I have some questions:
1. To quote the judge's findings:
"The defendants obtained an order by the Court requiring him to attend, an he again failed to attend.
... Fletcher himself refused to attend his noticed deposition after being order[ed] by the Court to attend"
Is anyone here involved with courts on a day-to-day basis? What is the point of having court orders if Fletcher can just refuse to obey the court order?
What would be the typical consequences for his refusal?
(I know there is a wide range of possible consequences .. I read this morning that a guy got six months in jail for contempt of court after yawning in court but this isn't typical)
2. "Their lawyer, Jerrold G. Neeff, knew it to be frivolous before it was even commenced"
Is there an ethics issue here? The typical rule I see is:
Rule 3-200 Prohibited Objectives of Employment
A member shall not seek, accept, or continue employment if the member knows or should know that the objective of such employment is:
(A) To bring an action, conduct a defense, assert a position in litigation, or take an appeal, without probable cause and for the purpose of harassing or maliciously injuring any person;
...
(Yeah - I know that's probably the wrong state. But I imagine there are similar ethics rules that the lawyer would be subject to)
The idea of 'maliciously injuring' might be unprovable, but the judge seemed 100% clear that the action was without probably cause and for the purpose of harassing, at the very least. Even if Jerrold G. Neeff didn't know at the outset that the case was unethical, surely he had an obligation to quit at some point ? His only plausible defence would be that he didn't know, nor should not have known. But that would mean that he wasn't aware of the emails that his client had sent .. which would be hard to claim because he would have been provided with those documents as part of the discovery process.
So surely from the moment that he received those emails, wasn't the only ethical course of action to quit the case ?
Clearly, I am not a lawyer - and I don't want to pile on the poor guy who would have had the client from hell, and an impossible case to proceed with. And once it was clear to him that the case was totally frivolous, the best thing for the victims would have been to get the case to court so the judge can announce to the world that the case is frivolous. If he had quit the case (which the ethics rules seem to say he should have) then the victims would have been worse off .. it would have given more delays and suffering for people who are having their life savings threatened.
I'm just curious what this kind of case means the for the lawyers involved.
Mac