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Prenda Gets Hit Hard With Contempt Sanctions For Lying To Court
walterbyrd writes: Team Prenda has been beaten up by the courts once again. Given all of the flat out deceit, it's actually a bit anti-climactic that the court has ordered sanctions of just $65,263 against Steele and Hansmeier for contempt of court. As for the obstruction of discovery, the court orders Duffy and Steele to pay Booth Sweet's costs, which the lawyers are told to submit. Some people are still wondering why none of this pattern of deceit, lying and abuse of the court system has not resulted in anything more serious.
seriously, isn't the a good example of lawyers that should be disbarred? lying to the court and using the law to harass seems like good reasons to disbar a lawyer.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Yes, by all means, let us condemn and entire industry because of your real-world, terrible experience, or the assholes mentioned in the Prenda story. Yes, that's perfectly logical and is a sensible, productive way to run society. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Yes, it is definitely wrong to judge a group based on just one member, but how about when 90% or more of it's members are an issue? I have known dozens of lawyers, and I have known one that was a useful and good person. Of the others, I will admit that most of them weren't openly evil, just evil by being useless and not doing their job when some other lawyer was attempting to do you evil. However, in some circumstances I have worked for lawyers and in those cases, the lawyer was quite definitely openly evil such that I will never again work for a company that has a lawyer in its upper management.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
As someone who was the victim of a litigation started by greedy family members using a lawyer who failed at some his basic fiduciary responsibilities, I can concur that there are some damned shady, or just as often incompetent lawyers. In a nutshell, my grandmother gave me a piece of property, some family members agreed with that while she was still of sound mind, but as soon as she started suffering dementia, they got a lawyer to sue my ass off. This lawyer was effectively acting as my grandmother's legal council, and he never actually even met her. That was one among a number of serious ethical lapses that ended up costing me about $100,000 (my legal costs plus the pay out I made because, I confess, three years of legal hell just made me make the problem go away).
But to counter that awful story, my lawyer, who cost me about 40% of that $100k, was absolute fantastic, worth every penny, and who would inform me before making statements or depositions that I wasn't to lie and was to take my oath to tell the truth seriously.As with all occupations, the fact that there are bad, even sociopathically evil lawyers, does not mean all lawyers are of a similar bent.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My best friend for many years is a lawyer and he's taught me a lot about how the legal system really works. I can assure you that non-lawyers almost never understand the reality of the US legal system. Judges rarely like to sanction lawyers like has happened to Prenda. The general feeling in the legal industry is that making one side of lawyers pay the other side's costs is very bad because it might - no joke - lead to fewer lawsuits. You see, lawyers and judges feel that the system works perfectly fine as it is and that any time you've been wronged, they have no problem with the idea that you may have to pay tens of thousands of dollars or much more to defend yourself by hiring an attorney and running up costs. And what you might not know is that paying off attorney fees has a higher priority than anything else because the judges and attorneys have fixed the system to insure that they get paid first and they get paid all that you owe them. Believe me when I tell you that attorneys and judges are not even a little bit troubled by the massive costs that innocent parties expend trying to defend themselves from predatory attorneys and they truly do not care if it destroys financially to pay them off, but by God you will pay your attorney and court fees fully or they'll put you in jail or confiscate your stuff if they have to to get it done. If you win a financial judgement against another party, good luck getting a sheriff interested in enforcing the payment on your behalf but those same sheriffs will not hesitate at all to make you pay off legal fees you owe. My guess is that Prenda will simply file appeal after appeal on the judgement against them and it may be many years before they pay it, if ever.
I guess it's just another example of 'you get what you pay for'.
In this case, I believe the phrase is "exactly as much justice as you can afford"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"