Fun With Dick And Jane

I had my reservations about sharing this story. But a partner in the firm assured me that the story was just too good to pass up. Names and addresses and other identifying information have, of course, been altered.

My client began this adventure by owning one acre of land. He built a house on it, and got a street address, which we’ll call “123 Main Street,” located on the northern half of the lot. Then, he began building another house on the southern half of the lot, got a subdivision, and the southern parcel was assigned a street address of “125 Main Street.” Then, he sold 123 Main Street to a woman, who we’ll call Jane for purposes of the story. Jane is married to Dick, and they are African-American. I include this fact for a reason which will become apparent shortly. Remember, though, that the property was sold only to Jane, as her separate property.

So now, the acre of land looks something like this:

The house at 123 Main Street is complete, and Dick and Jane move in and start living there. My client continues working on the incomplete house at 125 Main Street, living on the lot in his trailer. This situation persists for seven months. At the end of the seven months, Dick begins to verbally harass my client. (At least, according to my client he does.) Then, my client obtains a certificate of occupancy from the county, which means that the house at 125 Main Street can now be lived in, and more importantly, sold. Within a few days of that certificate being issued, Dick calls the sheriff and produces a grant deed conveying the entire one-acre parcel to Jane, and the sheriff then throws my guy off the property. My client moves in with his girlfriend, a few miles away.

My client says that he only intended to sell the north parcel and someone (maybe the title company, maybe the escrow company) screwed up because the documents do not reflect the transaction; Dick and Jane say that no, the transaction was to sell the whole acre and that’s what the documents say. We file a quiet title action, to get the issue resolved, and bring in the title company and the escrow company to figure out who wrote the wrong legal description of the property on the grant deed. The title company and the escrow company point fingers at each other, there are some motions about whether they should be in the case or not.

So far, this is working out to be a pretty ordinary sort of case. Trust me, it doesn’t work out that way. This is a long post, but by the end of it you’ll be as stunned as I am.

Dick and Jane’s attorney lets slip in a phoned-in appearance that his clients are having financial troubles and the property may be moving to foreclosure. Wisely, the judge presiding over the dispute says, “Aha! There is financial distress and the property is at risk. Everyone, go to an early neutral evaluation* right now!” So a few weeks later, we go to do that.

That’s when I meet Dick and Jane’s lawyer for the first time. He, ah, fails to impress. He looks, acts, and talks like Columbo. He’s got the bumbling, distracted, absent-minded part down pat, except he’s obviously not as clever as the TV detective. All the other lawyers are wearing business suits which is what you wear to things like this; but this guy shows up with a short-sleeved shirt, a tie with a soup stain on it that must be at least twenty years old, and no jacket. And untied shoelaces that, for three and a half hours, he never once makes any move to tie, even after my client points out that he’s in danger of tripping over them as he shuffles down the hallway.

Dick and Jane arrive nearly an hour late. Jane makes an elaborate show of gently easing herself into her chair at the conference table, and Dick loudly and proudly announces that they have a baby on the way. There are general expressions of congratulations, although to me it looks like if she’s pregnant, she isn’t showing at all. After this, Jane doesn’t say a word to anyone.

So, we get down to business. I say my bit, the title company lawyer says his bit, the escrow company lawyer says his bit. We all explain what the general facts are, why we think we’re going to win, and what we think we’re entitled to. Then, it gets to be Dick and Jane’s turn. Columbo lets Dick do all the talking. He begins by saying that the transaction was for the whole acre of land. But when the evaluator asks him, “So why did TL’s client live on the south parcel for seven months and keep on building a house there, without asking for any money from you?” Dick says that of course he did, because he was the contractor.

Huh?

Everyone, including Columbo, looks blankly at Dick. The evaluator says, “Well, most contractors don’t live on the property they’re developing, and they usually sell property they’ve subdivided at a profit. What were comparable houses in the neighborhood selling for?” Logical enough points, but Dick says instead that he thinks my client should “just walk away.” The evaluator points out that there’s no reason for him to do that, at least not until the dispute is sorted out.

In response, Dick talks about how anxious he and Jane were to get into the property because it was a real deal and he figured that my client must have been in some financial distress to offer so much property for just under half what other houses in the market were going for. I start to think, aha! Here is my opportunity to explain why the transaction was really for only one of the two parcels!

But before I can jump in and start steering things my way, Dick’s story devolves into a diatribe of unfiltered Male Black Rage. He explains, calmly at first but with building emotion that eventually brings up tears of anger, that my client is the evil, racist mastermind behind a plot to steal money from him and his wife because he couldn’t stand to see Black people making money. (Dick apparently doesn’t know that my client is dating an African-American woman.) He deliberately stayed on the other half of the property and finished building that house so that he could steal it all back from Jane.

My client is absolutely beside himself and I need to physically pat him on the shoulder to keep him in his seat. Can you blame him?

The evaluator tries to explain that this isn’t about black or white, it’s about green, but by now Dick is worked up into a frenzy and he won’t be stopped until everyone has heard him explain how nearly all of the while folks in the Antelope Valley think it’s perfectly okay to lie, cheat, and steal from the Black man.

Obviously, we’re not going to be getting anywhere, so we break up the meeting as Dick storms out of the room, Jane elaborately pushes her body out of the chair with her arms and grunts wit the effort of walking, and Columbo meanders away. My client and I pack up our stuff to leave. That’s when Columbo shuffles back in the room and mentions, “Oh, by the way, my clients filed for bankruptcy a few weeks ago.”

Huh. Do you think that might have made a little bit of difference in the case? Let’s classify this little bit of trivia under the heading “Things That TL Could Have Been Told About Before Driving Half A Day Through Heavy Traffic Into Los Angeles And Making His Client Sit Through An Hour Of Insulting Racial Paranoia!”

Thus, the early neutral evaluation ends, in what I would charitably describe as a fiasco.

But now is the part where it gets weird.

Yesterday, my client drops by my office while I’m eyebrow-deep in opposing a motion in a different case. “Is TL in? I got some papers today and I want to talk to him about them.” I step up and say, “Hey, Client! How’s it going? You look upset, what happened?” He hands me a packet of papers and says a Sheriff served him with those papers at six o’clock that morning.

The papers are a temporary restraining order and an application for an injunction. Dick has filed a civil harassment action against my client and we need to show up in a few weeks for a hearing on the injunction. In the civil harassment action, he alleges that my client:

• “beat him down” (a phrase Dick had used in his diatribe to describe the financial pressures of the litigation, which I charitably must allow that a judge would have interpreted as a report of physical violence that did not, in fact, happen),
• “Had them having sex in front of home,” (ew!)
• “But [put?] unbearable assaults unimaginable stalking,”
• “Murder,”
• “harassing my family with civil brute force. Which resulted in the death of our first child financially devastating plaintiff.”
• “Pay $3,000 per day his Les Pendence stay on our Family estate, also the proper disposal of my unborn child. Not cause any other deaths directly or indirectly.”
• “Coming on our property Invoking fear and stress at his presence. Casting evil spells witchcraft and Rite’s Candles penny’s in our driveway, to bring us misfortune. Stay away go away.”

Witchcraft?

So now I’m supposed to believe that my client is a witch? No, not a witch, a warlock? A wizard, a magician? What kind? A conjurer, perhaps? An illusionist, an alchemist, a predigistator, a seer, a shaman, a sorcerer? A necromancer? We’re supposed to believe that he’s induced a miscarriage with candles and cursed pennies?

Look, I understand that being sued isn’t any fun and it probably is inhibiting their ability to sell the property if they need the money. I also understand that if Jane really did miscarry, it was a traumatic and painful event for both of them. But accusing my client of witchcraft is just plain deranged.

Perhaps even more outrageous, a court actually granted a temporary restraining order based on an affidavit with this in it?

That’s where the situation is right now. The hearing will be in a couple of weeks, when I would hope to ask the judge my big question:

I don’t know how the case will resolve yet, but I know one thing for sure. Dick and Jane didn’t do themselves any favors with this ill-advised trick, which ought to be obvious even to the non-lawyers out there.

* Early neutral evaluations are something kind of new in the world of litigation. In a mediation, the parties sit down together and a neutral party facilitates settlement discussions. This is basically the same thing, but done very early in the process, and usually before anyone has done any discovery (so that attorney’s fees have not yet been run up into the troposphere). The evaluator listens to what each party thinks they will be able to prove, and offers an opinion about each side’s case and what is likely to happen in the case. Often, she then gives the parties advice about to proceed with settlement discussions.