My very first jury trial

In a series of posts over the span of a few months, I compiled the story of my very first jury trial as a 1st-year lawyer, on this blog. For anyone interested in reading part or all of the story, I assembled links to all of its chapters here. Chapter One is this post. The rest are here: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Conclusion. Here goes nothing...

At the time this case came across my desk, I was a 1st year associate at a 10-lawyer civil defense firm. Most of our clients were insurance companies, and most of my time was accordingly spent either defending people insured by those insurance companies, or defending the insurance companies themselves from whatever troubles made their way to their corporate headquarters. The point is, I was one of the bad guys defending the big bad corporate monsters. I say that tongue in cheek of course, because I very much enjoy representing insurance companies, the vast majority of which work hard to do business ethically and stay out of trouble. But, at the time, I had never gone to trial. I'd done several depositions, and argued motions in court now and then, but no trial experience.

With that in mind, one of the firm's partners came to me one day and asked me to handle a small, pro bono plaintiff's case that I could "probably wrap up pretty quickly." Ahem. The humor in that you will appreciate later.

The case basically involved a tiny fender bender incident and a stubborn insurance company (that we obviously didn't work with). The client was a little old lady who spoke no English--let's say she spoke only the Czech language and her name is Helga--was very poor, and was uninsured. The partner felt sorry for her and told her, lucky for me, that our firm would help her out, even though we usually represent insurance companies and not plaintiffs. The facts of the accident were fairly simple: As she was exiting the parking lot of a grocery store, there was a guy ("Boris") in his car to her left who was also in the exit area at the same time. However, Boris was in the middle of the exit and had no turn signal on, and there was room to his right for her to exit onto the street. Therefore, she pulled up next to him, turned on her signal, waited for a break in the traffic, and moved into the street. Unfortunately, so did Boris, at the same time and in the same direction. Their front bumpers made love for about 2 seconds. There was no real "impact" per se, just a 2-second scratching and dragging incident, which left both cars with small but noticeable gashes on their respective front sides, and our client's bumper hanging down, about to fall off. Helga wasn't physically hurt at all. From estimates she'd gotten, all she wanted was 1200 bucks to fix her car.

Boris was covered by his insurance company for the accident, and it investigated the matter. Apparently the company had initially told Helga they would fix her car for her and accept that Boris caused the accident. But the adjuster, Natasha, changed her mind at some point. Because Natasha wanted to give Helga only 400 bucks, and Helga refused to accept it, Natasha decided to hand the case over to the company's lawyer. His name was Skeletor.

Thinking to myself, "Hah, it's in a lawyer's hands! I will simply call my fellow lawyer, Skeletor, and after having a good laugh with him about how silly it was for either of us fine litigators to spend a great deal of time on this cute little matter, get it all settled! Hah!"

So I picked up the phone and called Skeletor:

UCL: Skeletor, hey! How's it going over there at Vader, Milosevic & Tikrit? Is my ol' classmate Stacy still working over there?

Skeletor: UCL, hey! Good to hear from you, yeah she is and she misses working with you guys. So what's new at Skywalker, Indiana & Jones?

[more incessant chatter about nothing]

UCL: Anyway... I wanted to talk to you about this Helga and Boris matter. What's your take on this whole thing?

Skeletor: Oh yeah the Helga and Boris matter, heh! Let's see, hmmm, oh yes, that's right, well UCL, here's the deal...

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

TO BE CONTINUED!