What a nightmare the days before the brief deadline were. Here's the problem: my client is an old lawyer who never really practiced, and instead got into real-estate and other business transactions early on in his career. So, basically, I'm dealing with someone who thinks he knows how to litigate a case, because he's a lawyer, but in reality doesn't know half as much as he thinks he knows. (Nicest guy, by the way ... a lot of fun to hang out with, and very considerate - he once brought me some ambien because i told him i was having trouble sleeping).
Anyway, he'll try to tell me how to do something, without really being able to properly communicate what he wants. So I'll do what I think he wants, at which point he gets pissed off that I didn't do what he wanted me to do. Then he tries to tell me why I did it all wrong, but since he's just not good at communicating, he can't even explain that properly. So I'm left confused about what the hell his problem is, what he thinks I did wrong, and what I need to do now.
So he panicked after the hearing, and decided to take charge of the case again. What this meant was that the guy who didn't really know how to do legal research, write a legal argument, or even organize his thoughts for that matter, began to micro-manage how i wrote the brief. As I usually do when I prepare to write a legal argument, I wanted to do my research first. He, on the other hand, thought it would be a better idea for me to just write down our arguments, and leave the research to him and a couple of assistants he had recruited to help us. Fine. So I have a 4-hour meeting with him on Sunday night, where we sit down and outline our entire argument. I then go home and take those ideas and turn them into a written brief and e-mail them to him to review.
He calls me monday afternoon and tells me that what I wrote was absolutely useless, and that I needed to come into the office to meet with him and start all over. I go in on tuesday, and he tells me to do the opposite of what he had originally told me to do. So I spend the rest of the day doing that, and e-mail him my work that night. The next morning I get a call telling me that he's upset with what I've done, and that I need to go in again to do it right. In the meantime, we're having countless arguments (he loves to talk, and I'm just about sick and tired of listening to him repeat himself) and we're even getting into screaming matches. At least we were entertaining the rest of the office tho. I think the icing on the cake was when he read over my work, told me that he liked it and that it was great. He then showed it to another attorney in the office who started marking it up and telling me that it was all wrong, at which point my client was like - "yea, didn't I tell you to do blah blah blah?" I swear I wanted to strangle him. I'm pretty sure if he weren't an old guy, I would have gotten into a fist fight with him.
Another one of the screaming matches happened when I deleted a bunch of the stuff I had written, after he had told me it was garbage. So on wednesday afternoon, a couple of hours before our filing deadline, he remembered the part I had deleted, and asked me where it was. I told him I deleted it, and he started freaking out, telling me that I can't be brain-dead and whatnot. A cussing / screaming match ensued, followed by me going and printing out the part that I had previously deleted.
OHHH, earlier on wednesday, I'm on the phone with a friend trying to find cases on a specific issue that we've been having problems with. So he comes by my desk and starts listening in on the conversation. After about a minute, while I'm on the phone with my friend, he's like - "we don't have time for this, we just have to write what we have and leave it at that." So I'm trying to tell him that he's the one who wanted me to look for this law in the first place, and he starts yelling about how I had plenty of time to do it before, and that now we won't get the brief filed in time. Meanwhile my friends is on the phone, listening to this argument, so I tell her: "ok, I'll call you back," at which point he says "NO, you'll call her tomorrow. you don't have time to call her today." So he and I get into it and I yell at him to go away. After I hang up the phone, I go into his office and start yelling at him and telling him what I'm going to do if he disrespects me like that again.
Christ, it sounds like a freakin comedy!
The funniest part of all of this is that if he had just let me do what I thought needed to be done, it would have gotten done right in the first place, and without all of the headache. But hey, I guess that would spoil all the fun, right?
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