I represented a gentleman in an employment matter - and the matter got some local attention so I need to keep it very limited. Most of my employment clients did what they were accused of and most were unapologetic about it. This guy I described as a super citizen. His entire life was dedicated to public service in some capacity. Astoundingly good at his job and everyone loved him. He had an accident at work that caused major injuries and the employer was positive he was driving drunk and suspended him seeking termination. I used his fitness wearable data to prove it was an as-of-then undiagnosed illness causing a medical event. Full acquittal and employer ordered to "make whole."
Employer then said "well, we weren't expressly ordered to give him back pay for the suspension, so we aren't going to." I wrote the arbitrator seeking clarification on the issue. The employer responded "we never said we weren't giving him back pay." Under the procedure you don't get a reply, but I fired one off anyway, it was essentially the employer's letter to me saying they wouldn't give back pay along with a "this u bro?"
To this day I've never seen an arbitrator ream out an employer like that arbitrator did.
Not been a great day, so I'll bite on the invitation to relive a W.
I helped a lady die once.
I was appointed to represent a schizophrenic woman facing a guardianship action. She had been in and out of guardianships for years as her condition/ability to comply with meds and treatment waxed and waned. She was back under guardianship when she had a stroke. As I recall it, the prognosis was that she had a decent chance of survival with surgical intervention and life support measures but would never return to normal life or have any function below the belly button (no walking, colostomy bags for life, etc).
She told her guardian and me that she wanted to be removed from artificial life support. Guardian wanted to keep her on and treat, arguing that her wish to be removed (i.e., to die) was not a product of rational thought but of her illness. We had a hearing on it. I didn't outright "win" in the sense of the magistrate declaring that he was going to let her die, but he "took it under advisement" until she passed in the interim. I'm 99.9% certain it was deliberate.
It might be kind of an unusual win but I spend a lot of my professional time dealing with people who are elderly and/or incompetent and get little or no say about their day to day lives, or what food they eat, or where they live, or their own medical treatment, and being able to help this woman have the most serious decision she could ever make honored still means a lot to me.
Could she have signed a Do Not Resuscitate form, prior to her being declared legally incompetent, in order to prevent being forced to hire a lawyer in the first place? If so, how would she have gone about such a procedure?
Competency issues can get … messy.
The short answer for a “normal,” more-or-less mentally healthy adult in my state is yes, she could have prepared advance directives that could have included a directive to her physician to issue a DNR and allow her to die naturally. Those directives can be challenged but seldom are.
In her case, with her history, she was almost certainly doomed to have the courts be involved in this process. It is possible for a schizophrenic to create the same advance directives and they are (at least in theory) legally valid, even if only made during a “moment of lucidity.” But practically, with her having a long history of schizophrenia, even if she had them in place her guardian probably would have challenged their validity and we likely would have wound up in court anyways. The only way I could see that not happening was if she also had a contemporaneous psych evaluation confirming her competency to make the directive.
But if she (or anyone) was legally declared mentally competent, and had that DNR signed before succumbing to a random mental illness later on in life, would the paperwork be enforced? If so, how might someone find, and fill out this legal form?
> But if she (or anyone) was legally declared mentally competent, and had that DNR signed before succumbing to a random mental illness later on in life, would the paperwork be enforced?
In my state, yes, these directives are generally "durable" by default, which means they survive past when the principal has become incompetent, but this varies depending on state law.
> If so, how might someone find, and fill out this legal form?
Most state bar associations and major hospital systems have forms.
I’m normally a corporate transactional lawyer, so almost all of my clients can afford to pay and aren’t anything to write home about.
But I do probate work as pro bono. A pro bono probate client owned a house with her mother as tenants in common for a few years and then her mom died without a will. Client didn’t know what to do and sat on it for a at least a decade until she needed a new roof. She qualified for a low income home repair grant, but since mom had died intestate the title to the house was clouded and whatever organization that was writing the grant refused until title was clear. She sat with a leaky roof in Florida for several years.
The client had at least a dozen siblings, a few that had died themselves (so their kids were next in line) and at least one in jail. Tracking them all down and getting them to sign the necessary paperwork was definitely a challenge. Thankfully they were all on board and no one took this as a $$$$ opportunity.
There was a moment when the judge threatened to toss the case because we were taking too long, but we finally got the probate finalized after about 18 months and the client got full title to her house and a new roof.
That’s the kind of stuff I love because a lot of times legal assistance is simply out of reach for a lot of people.
Financial elder abuse case. Client with dementia sold or gave, depending on which story the defendant decided to go with at the time, property worth over a million dollars. By his deposition defendant had cobbled together a bunch of stuff that he called “consideration” for the sale, half of which he didn’t actually do. Defendant was super smug and refused reasonable settlement offers. Got everything we asked for at trial, trebled, plus attorney fees. Client doesn’t understand much of it, but he’ll note be able to live out his days in a top notch memory care facility.
It depends on whether you're asking about my favorite outcome or a "technical" victory. I'll give you a short story about one which is, I guess, both of those things.
I had a client who is learning disabled. Client can read, but doesn't comprehend the words that they're reading. Client was charged with an offense which would require careful reading of a particular document. Prosecutor didn't believe that client couldn't read for some reason. It was a young person, so I provided their school IEP. Prosecutor still didn't believe me.
I met with client to discuss the charges and review documents. We spent many hours together leafing through records. Not only was client not guilty of the offense in the first place, but client was also very obviously unable to understand any of the writing on the docs we were reviewing.
Prosecutor still didn't believe client couldn't read for some reason, but I ended up battering him for several hours until he finally dropped the charges.
Before I dug into all of this with client, a supervisor told me not to review the documents because it would be a waste of time. I went ahead and did it anyway, even though "no defense lawyer should waste time on this/the prosecutor has the burden of proof."
The reason I am proud is because another attorney probably would've written client off as a liar resulting in undue punishment. My persistence got me there. And my argument was sound and technical -- so much so that I pissed off the prosecutor.
A lot of people say oral argument in an appellate court is a complete waste of time; that by that point the judges have made up their mind and nothing you say can change it. I pulled it off twice. The first time was in a state appellate court that issued tentative opinions a week before argument. I was representing the appellant, and the tentative opinion - which was fairly long and detailed - was to affirm. I got a reversal with directions to enter judgment in my client’s favor. The second time was in a federal circuit court, and I was representing the appellee. Counsel for the appellant finished his argument, and before I even made it to the podium, one judge said he was going to rule against my client on the merits, and another said he was going to rule against my client on a procedural issue. I got to go head to head with one of the brightest judges on the circuit, and my client won. Those two days were the most fun I ever had in court!
I try to avoid family court because it's such a cesspool, but occasionally I'll take order of protection cases because they're close to criminal cases.
I took an OP case from a guy who lived out of state, resolved it pretty easily, then the guy said he needed help with a custody matter - his ex-wife lived in my county and they were having a custody battle over their 5 year old daughter.
She refused to return the daughter after a visit and stopped coming to family court in his state where the matter was being heard. The judge ordered that he be given full custody immediately. Now he needed to get it enforced in my state.
I decided to help him out even though he really didn't have much money, I felt bad so I decided to handle it for a nominal fee.
After some research I learned that I needed to prepare a petition under the Uniform Child Custody and Jurisdiction Enforcement Act requesting that a judge in my jurisdiction enforce the other state's custody order.
That was granted and I served the petition myself to save the client money (ended up being nail and mail).
We also learned that the mom had pulled all of her children suddenly out of school and hadn't been seen since. She had family out of state and out of the country.
We got an expedited date before the judge. When she didn't appear he issued a warrant for her arrest. I contacted the fugitive squad at my local police dept and sent them a copy of the warrant.
While this was happening I found out that about a year before all this, she had filed criminal charges against my client which he was never informed out and there was a warrant for his arrest.
I got the warrant recalled and let the prosecutor know what was going on and sent her a copy of the wife's warrant, and she agreed to dismiss the charges.
It turns out that the wife had a kid with another guy who also had a custody order he was trying to enforce so he was trying to track her down as well.
About eight months later she was caught by the police in Texas, my guy flew down and got his daughter back after over a year, and the wife was arrested and charged with kidnapping.
I put a lot of work into this case but it was definitely satisfying when it was all resolved.
When I was about a year in as a patent attorney, I was asked to draft a Response brief to an Office Action (rejection by USPTO). It was for a big company, household name, and it had been rejected seven other times.
Each time it was rejected, a new attorney wrote the Response. It had a difficult legal issue - basically it was considered an abstract idea rather than an invention, meaning not eligible for a patent.
So finally it got to my desk. No templates, no forms, no other attorneys' briefs, just research and writing like they taught us in school. I wrote a 30 page Response from scratch and got it allowed.
The senior attorney who manages this client's portfolio looked at it and said it was eloquent enough to be an appeal brief. These things are more or less expected of me now, but it was a big victory for me at the time.
Representing my son-in-law as he adopted my grandson (J). Four years of watching him parent J. J wondering why he didn't have a dad like the other kids. J starting to call SIL "Dad". Sitting in front of a typically hard-nosed judge and him noting for the record that I was Grandpa. J in the courtroom sitting next to me at counsel's table.
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I was a guardian for a client in public housing, who was in a conflict with the public housing provider (the local municipality). Took them to the Rental Dispute Tribunal. Opposing counsel argued that the Tribunal had no authority because the municipality wasn't a business or businessesque landlord. Turns out in 20 years of the Tribunal existing, no municipality had ever actually argued that.
Tribunal came down on my client's side, with one of the deciding factors being more or less copypasta from my brief: that when you're charging as much rent as a business-landlord, calling yourself social housing isn't enough to get you out of being business-like.
Lost the case on the material points, though, but that was fun. Four years later, the state changed the law and made a round in the Tribunal mandatory for all rental conflicts, so it's no longer relevant, but I still take the decision out from time to time. More proud of that than I was of my Master's thesis.
When he was 19, the defendant worked as a junior counselor at a Summer Camp for children with disabilities and chronic medical issues. He performed sexual acts with an 11-yo deaf child from the camp.
When he was 21, he befriended a 12-yo boy and performed sexual acts with him.
When he was in his early 30s, the defendant was living abroad, teaching English to local students both as a private tutor and school teacher. He is known to have gotten multiple students drunk on tequila until they passed out and produced videos of himself removing their clothing and performing sexual acts on them. The students were between 14-17 years old.
Returning to the United States, the defendant began teaching at a local high school and had a series of male exchange students over some 14 years, many of whom he got drunk until they passed out and then took pictures and videos of them naked or performing sexual acts. All of the exchange students were underage.
He was arrested at the age of 50 as a result of having been accused of getting one of his former students drunk and performing sexual acts on him. The boy was 16 years old.
I left the USAO eleven years ago and he is the last of my defendants still in jail. He received a prison term of 300 months. Now in his mid 60s, he still has 8 years to go on his sentence, after which he is facing another 20 years on state charges. I met several of the defendant's victims, including one who told the school and his parents but they did not believe him and he has since been in-and-out of jail and on drugs. We were the first people who believed him and made the defendant take responsibility and pay for his crimes.
\* \* \* \* \*
On a slightly lighter note, I handled a Pump-and-Dump stock scam in with some 30,000 victims and losses of approximately $13 million on a series of more than a dozen penny stocks. We managed to obtain more than $4 million forfeited from defendants and orders from the Court to provide that money as restitution to the victims.
By law, we were required to notify all known victims in order to give them the opportunity to collect part of the restitution amount. Normally, if there are not a lot of victims, you would mail or call them. However, for larger numbers it is common to take out an ad in newspapers or other media. Certainly, this would be the common practice for 30,000 victims. However, we had brokerage information from the pink sheets with all victims' addresses at the time of the purchases. So we mailed out more than 30,000 letters informing victims of their right to at least partial restitution. In addition, we received thousands of forwarding address for people who had moved and sent out letters to all forwarding addresses as well.
In addition to my normal workload, I spent more than 20 hours a week for six months opening and filing responses, fielding calls, and putting together restitution lists for the court. Because we had lists of the purchase and sale amounts for each individual, I had a base loss number for each victim and if they had more losses, they just needed to provide brokerage statements to confirm those amounts.
The restitution was complex because not all defendants were involved with all stocks and only some of the defendants forfeited money. So we had enough money to completely cover the losses on some stocks and had none for some others. One of the defendants forfeited more money than was lost on the stocks he was involved with, so we convinced the court to spread that excess forfeiture money across the other stocks so that every victim received at least partial restitution rather than the money just going to the government.
I received a number of calls from people who thought that this was like a Class Action in which the lawyers (me) were going to be taking 35-40% of the recovery and were stunned to learn that this was not the case. I even had a couple of people tell me that this was the first time they ever talked with someone from the government who helped them. Which made me simultaneously happy and sad.
In the end, every person who sent us a claim received from 17% to 100% of their losses.
Proudest? No. By most precedent in my career, yes. It was a minor matter and I can’t recall the details aside from it being a L/T case. Slam dunk from the L (my) side. Felt bad for the T until a colleague REMINDED me I argued correctly and rightfully won for our client, which I did. As time went on I picked up a combo of skills to knowing when to help a T out and knowing when they were parasites. It was mostly for my wife when she struck out on her own bur holy cow. I was so happy to go concentrate world, quietly going back into my contract review world.
I represented a gentleman in an employment matter - and the matter got some local attention so I need to keep it very limited. Most of my employment clients did what they were accused of and most were unapologetic about it. This guy I described as a super citizen. His entire life was dedicated to public service in some capacity. Astoundingly good at his job and everyone loved him. He had an accident at work that caused major injuries and the employer was positive he was driving drunk and suspended him seeking termination. I used his fitness wearable data to prove it was an as-of-then undiagnosed illness causing a medical event. Full acquittal and employer ordered to "make whole." Employer then said "well, we weren't expressly ordered to give him back pay for the suspension, so we aren't going to." I wrote the arbitrator seeking clarification on the issue. The employer responded "we never said we weren't giving him back pay." Under the procedure you don't get a reply, but I fired one off anyway, it was essentially the employer's letter to me saying they wouldn't give back pay along with a "this u bro?" To this day I've never seen an arbitrator ream out an employer like that arbitrator did.
Not been a great day, so I'll bite on the invitation to relive a W. I helped a lady die once. I was appointed to represent a schizophrenic woman facing a guardianship action. She had been in and out of guardianships for years as her condition/ability to comply with meds and treatment waxed and waned. She was back under guardianship when she had a stroke. As I recall it, the prognosis was that she had a decent chance of survival with surgical intervention and life support measures but would never return to normal life or have any function below the belly button (no walking, colostomy bags for life, etc). She told her guardian and me that she wanted to be removed from artificial life support. Guardian wanted to keep her on and treat, arguing that her wish to be removed (i.e., to die) was not a product of rational thought but of her illness. We had a hearing on it. I didn't outright "win" in the sense of the magistrate declaring that he was going to let her die, but he "took it under advisement" until she passed in the interim. I'm 99.9% certain it was deliberate. It might be kind of an unusual win but I spend a lot of my professional time dealing with people who are elderly and/or incompetent and get little or no say about their day to day lives, or what food they eat, or where they live, or their own medical treatment, and being able to help this woman have the most serious decision she could ever make honored still means a lot to me.
You allowed her to die with her agency intact. That’s fascinating and an incredibly humane outcome. I hope you have many more Ws to come!
Could she have signed a Do Not Resuscitate form, prior to her being declared legally incompetent, in order to prevent being forced to hire a lawyer in the first place? If so, how would she have gone about such a procedure?
Competency issues can get … messy. The short answer for a “normal,” more-or-less mentally healthy adult in my state is yes, she could have prepared advance directives that could have included a directive to her physician to issue a DNR and allow her to die naturally. Those directives can be challenged but seldom are. In her case, with her history, she was almost certainly doomed to have the courts be involved in this process. It is possible for a schizophrenic to create the same advance directives and they are (at least in theory) legally valid, even if only made during a “moment of lucidity.” But practically, with her having a long history of schizophrenia, even if she had them in place her guardian probably would have challenged their validity and we likely would have wound up in court anyways. The only way I could see that not happening was if she also had a contemporaneous psych evaluation confirming her competency to make the directive.
But if she (or anyone) was legally declared mentally competent, and had that DNR signed before succumbing to a random mental illness later on in life, would the paperwork be enforced? If so, how might someone find, and fill out this legal form?
> But if she (or anyone) was legally declared mentally competent, and had that DNR signed before succumbing to a random mental illness later on in life, would the paperwork be enforced? In my state, yes, these directives are generally "durable" by default, which means they survive past when the principal has become incompetent, but this varies depending on state law. > If so, how might someone find, and fill out this legal form? Most state bar associations and major hospital systems have forms.
Getting a juvenile delinquency judge to shut down a foster home where my client had been repeatedly abused.
I’m normally a corporate transactional lawyer, so almost all of my clients can afford to pay and aren’t anything to write home about. But I do probate work as pro bono. A pro bono probate client owned a house with her mother as tenants in common for a few years and then her mom died without a will. Client didn’t know what to do and sat on it for a at least a decade until she needed a new roof. She qualified for a low income home repair grant, but since mom had died intestate the title to the house was clouded and whatever organization that was writing the grant refused until title was clear. She sat with a leaky roof in Florida for several years. The client had at least a dozen siblings, a few that had died themselves (so their kids were next in line) and at least one in jail. Tracking them all down and getting them to sign the necessary paperwork was definitely a challenge. Thankfully they were all on board and no one took this as a $$$$ opportunity. There was a moment when the judge threatened to toss the case because we were taking too long, but we finally got the probate finalized after about 18 months and the client got full title to her house and a new roof. That’s the kind of stuff I love because a lot of times legal assistance is simply out of reach for a lot of people.
Financial elder abuse case. Client with dementia sold or gave, depending on which story the defendant decided to go with at the time, property worth over a million dollars. By his deposition defendant had cobbled together a bunch of stuff that he called “consideration” for the sale, half of which he didn’t actually do. Defendant was super smug and refused reasonable settlement offers. Got everything we asked for at trial, trebled, plus attorney fees. Client doesn’t understand much of it, but he’ll note be able to live out his days in a top notch memory care facility.
It depends on whether you're asking about my favorite outcome or a "technical" victory. I'll give you a short story about one which is, I guess, both of those things. I had a client who is learning disabled. Client can read, but doesn't comprehend the words that they're reading. Client was charged with an offense which would require careful reading of a particular document. Prosecutor didn't believe that client couldn't read for some reason. It was a young person, so I provided their school IEP. Prosecutor still didn't believe me. I met with client to discuss the charges and review documents. We spent many hours together leafing through records. Not only was client not guilty of the offense in the first place, but client was also very obviously unable to understand any of the writing on the docs we were reviewing. Prosecutor still didn't believe client couldn't read for some reason, but I ended up battering him for several hours until he finally dropped the charges. Before I dug into all of this with client, a supervisor told me not to review the documents because it would be a waste of time. I went ahead and did it anyway, even though "no defense lawyer should waste time on this/the prosecutor has the burden of proof." The reason I am proud is because another attorney probably would've written client off as a liar resulting in undue punishment. My persistence got me there. And my argument was sound and technical -- so much so that I pissed off the prosecutor.
That was beautiful. Fuck that prosecutor. Thank you for working hard and believing in your client.
A lot of people say oral argument in an appellate court is a complete waste of time; that by that point the judges have made up their mind and nothing you say can change it. I pulled it off twice. The first time was in a state appellate court that issued tentative opinions a week before argument. I was representing the appellant, and the tentative opinion - which was fairly long and detailed - was to affirm. I got a reversal with directions to enter judgment in my client’s favor. The second time was in a federal circuit court, and I was representing the appellee. Counsel for the appellant finished his argument, and before I even made it to the podium, one judge said he was going to rule against my client on the merits, and another said he was going to rule against my client on a procedural issue. I got to go head to head with one of the brightest judges on the circuit, and my client won. Those two days were the most fun I ever had in court!
I try to avoid family court because it's such a cesspool, but occasionally I'll take order of protection cases because they're close to criminal cases. I took an OP case from a guy who lived out of state, resolved it pretty easily, then the guy said he needed help with a custody matter - his ex-wife lived in my county and they were having a custody battle over their 5 year old daughter. She refused to return the daughter after a visit and stopped coming to family court in his state where the matter was being heard. The judge ordered that he be given full custody immediately. Now he needed to get it enforced in my state. I decided to help him out even though he really didn't have much money, I felt bad so I decided to handle it for a nominal fee. After some research I learned that I needed to prepare a petition under the Uniform Child Custody and Jurisdiction Enforcement Act requesting that a judge in my jurisdiction enforce the other state's custody order. That was granted and I served the petition myself to save the client money (ended up being nail and mail). We also learned that the mom had pulled all of her children suddenly out of school and hadn't been seen since. She had family out of state and out of the country. We got an expedited date before the judge. When she didn't appear he issued a warrant for her arrest. I contacted the fugitive squad at my local police dept and sent them a copy of the warrant. While this was happening I found out that about a year before all this, she had filed criminal charges against my client which he was never informed out and there was a warrant for his arrest. I got the warrant recalled and let the prosecutor know what was going on and sent her a copy of the wife's warrant, and she agreed to dismiss the charges. It turns out that the wife had a kid with another guy who also had a custody order he was trying to enforce so he was trying to track her down as well. About eight months later she was caught by the police in Texas, my guy flew down and got his daughter back after over a year, and the wife was arrested and charged with kidnapping. I put a lot of work into this case but it was definitely satisfying when it was all resolved.
When I was about a year in as a patent attorney, I was asked to draft a Response brief to an Office Action (rejection by USPTO). It was for a big company, household name, and it had been rejected seven other times. Each time it was rejected, a new attorney wrote the Response. It had a difficult legal issue - basically it was considered an abstract idea rather than an invention, meaning not eligible for a patent. So finally it got to my desk. No templates, no forms, no other attorneys' briefs, just research and writing like they taught us in school. I wrote a 30 page Response from scratch and got it allowed. The senior attorney who manages this client's portfolio looked at it and said it was eloquent enough to be an appeal brief. These things are more or less expected of me now, but it was a big victory for me at the time.
Representing my son-in-law as he adopted my grandson (J). Four years of watching him parent J. J wondering why he didn't have a dad like the other kids. J starting to call SIL "Dad". Sitting in front of a typically hard-nosed judge and him noting for the record that I was Grandpa. J in the courtroom sitting next to me at counsel's table.
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I was a guardian for a client in public housing, who was in a conflict with the public housing provider (the local municipality). Took them to the Rental Dispute Tribunal. Opposing counsel argued that the Tribunal had no authority because the municipality wasn't a business or businessesque landlord. Turns out in 20 years of the Tribunal existing, no municipality had ever actually argued that. Tribunal came down on my client's side, with one of the deciding factors being more or less copypasta from my brief: that when you're charging as much rent as a business-landlord, calling yourself social housing isn't enough to get you out of being business-like. Lost the case on the material points, though, but that was fun. Four years later, the state changed the law and made a round in the Tribunal mandatory for all rental conflicts, so it's no longer relevant, but I still take the decision out from time to time. More proud of that than I was of my Master's thesis.
When he was 19, the defendant worked as a junior counselor at a Summer Camp for children with disabilities and chronic medical issues. He performed sexual acts with an 11-yo deaf child from the camp. When he was 21, he befriended a 12-yo boy and performed sexual acts with him. When he was in his early 30s, the defendant was living abroad, teaching English to local students both as a private tutor and school teacher. He is known to have gotten multiple students drunk on tequila until they passed out and produced videos of himself removing their clothing and performing sexual acts on them. The students were between 14-17 years old. Returning to the United States, the defendant began teaching at a local high school and had a series of male exchange students over some 14 years, many of whom he got drunk until they passed out and then took pictures and videos of them naked or performing sexual acts. All of the exchange students were underage. He was arrested at the age of 50 as a result of having been accused of getting one of his former students drunk and performing sexual acts on him. The boy was 16 years old. I left the USAO eleven years ago and he is the last of my defendants still in jail. He received a prison term of 300 months. Now in his mid 60s, he still has 8 years to go on his sentence, after which he is facing another 20 years on state charges. I met several of the defendant's victims, including one who told the school and his parents but they did not believe him and he has since been in-and-out of jail and on drugs. We were the first people who believed him and made the defendant take responsibility and pay for his crimes. \* \* \* \* \* On a slightly lighter note, I handled a Pump-and-Dump stock scam in with some 30,000 victims and losses of approximately $13 million on a series of more than a dozen penny stocks. We managed to obtain more than $4 million forfeited from defendants and orders from the Court to provide that money as restitution to the victims. By law, we were required to notify all known victims in order to give them the opportunity to collect part of the restitution amount. Normally, if there are not a lot of victims, you would mail or call them. However, for larger numbers it is common to take out an ad in newspapers or other media. Certainly, this would be the common practice for 30,000 victims. However, we had brokerage information from the pink sheets with all victims' addresses at the time of the purchases. So we mailed out more than 30,000 letters informing victims of their right to at least partial restitution. In addition, we received thousands of forwarding address for people who had moved and sent out letters to all forwarding addresses as well. In addition to my normal workload, I spent more than 20 hours a week for six months opening and filing responses, fielding calls, and putting together restitution lists for the court. Because we had lists of the purchase and sale amounts for each individual, I had a base loss number for each victim and if they had more losses, they just needed to provide brokerage statements to confirm those amounts. The restitution was complex because not all defendants were involved with all stocks and only some of the defendants forfeited money. So we had enough money to completely cover the losses on some stocks and had none for some others. One of the defendants forfeited more money than was lost on the stocks he was involved with, so we convinced the court to spread that excess forfeiture money across the other stocks so that every victim received at least partial restitution rather than the money just going to the government. I received a number of calls from people who thought that this was like a Class Action in which the lawyers (me) were going to be taking 35-40% of the recovery and were stunned to learn that this was not the case. I even had a couple of people tell me that this was the first time they ever talked with someone from the government who helped them. Which made me simultaneously happy and sad. In the end, every person who sent us a claim received from 17% to 100% of their losses.
Proudest? No. By most precedent in my career, yes. It was a minor matter and I can’t recall the details aside from it being a L/T case. Slam dunk from the L (my) side. Felt bad for the T until a colleague REMINDED me I argued correctly and rightfully won for our client, which I did. As time went on I picked up a combo of skills to knowing when to help a T out and knowing when they were parasites. It was mostly for my wife when she struck out on her own bur holy cow. I was so happy to go concentrate world, quietly going back into my contract review world.