A posturing attorney introduced me to a technique I had not yet experienced.
Yesterday, I served an anti-SLAPP motion on the two attorneys listed on the complaint. This morning I received an email from one of those attorneys, acknowledging receipt of the motion, and asking that I change our proof of service going forward. He asked me to add six more attorneys to the proof, all from the same firm.
I don’t like to come right out of the gate being obstructive. Doing so can create an unnecessarily adversarial atmosphere for the entire action. But I found the request to be entirely unreasonable. I can certainly understand that any firm would want to afford every attorney, paralegal, and secretary there the opportunity to read my prose, but that should be handled on their end, perhaps with some distribution list entitled, “This Guy Writes Like Shakespeare.” Unless you intend to list all eight attorneys on the pleadings, I don’t think it is my task to serve everyone you think might be interested. And I told him as much. I advised that as soon as I received a pleading from his office with all eight attorneys listed as the attorneys of record, I would change our proof of service to match.
He never responded on that point, and it was clear to me that this was a form of posturing, as in:
“You better be worried. We’ve assigned eight attorneys to this matter; ready to jump on anything you send. That anti-SLAPP motion you served? We all laughed at your anti-SLAPP motion. We fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!”
But as I have written many times, posturing often just comes back to humiliate you. Within five minutes of my email, opposing counsel called with a contrite tone. He asked if we would agree to continue the hearing on the motion to some later date. As it turns out, in the couple of hours between the “please add our entire firm to the proof of service” email, and the receipt of my response, the firm decided to fire the client. The requested continuance was being sought in order to afford the client some additional time to find new counsel.
What could have possibly occurred during those couple of hours? Mayhap they read the motion? Or perhaps the client wasn’t too happy with his case being staffed by eight attorneys.
[Update:] I will give the attorney the benefit of the doubt, and assume that when he called, he really did plan to withdraw from the case, and that his request was not just an attempted delaying tactic. But for whatever reason, he did not immediately do so. Perhaps he decided it was a bad idea to dump the client while an anti-SLAPP motion was pending. So he was still attorney of record at the time of the hearing, and he did his best to argue why it should be denied. We prevailed on the motion (naturellement), which led to some fun times over the attorney fees now owed by the opposing party to our client. All the details about how we recovered those fees and just for fun got the other defendant dismissed can be found in my article, A Curious Anti-SLAPP Victory Tale.