Thursday, September 08, 2005

Every Once and Awhile

I pretend that I am an attorney.

Tomorrow is one of those days because I have a witness to prep for my first trial ever that is coming up in a week. Now you would think that because this is my first trial, I would be really nervous, but I am not. Actually, I am kind of looking forward to the challenge and the mind fuck that I am going to lay on opposing counsel. While I am not necessarily nervous or stressed, I am realizing on a daily basis that I have no idea what I am supposed to do in terms of the actual trial meaning where I am I supposed to go, what am I supposed to bring, etc. Basically, instead of preparing the case, I am getting bogged down in simple details and all the meaningless practical crap. In reality, I probably should be more concerned with my opening, closing, cross examination, and direct examination, but for some reason, I think I will have all this figured out by the time the curtain opens.

It also does not help that there has been no work on the case up to this point so tomorrow is our first crack at figuring out what the hell happened in this matter. I guess it will probably be clearer tomorrow when I figure out why my guy's firetruck decided to crash into this guy's parked car. (that sentence is ripe with gay innuendo.) Of course, I highly doubt it because the more I work at this job, the more I realize that what seems to be simple just means that somebody is really lying in order to cover their own ass. There is no reason to expect tomorrow will be any different.

Now, the prep of the witness would not be a bad thing if I had not also been duly rewarded with a deposition in the afternoon. (For those that do not known, a deposition is when I get to sit in a room for five to six hours asking someone how they managed to trip and fall on a perfect sidewalk in the middle of beautiful summer day. Some attorneys only expend a couple of hours deposing people, but I kind of like to see how long my fellow man can go without food. If I am not eating, they are not eating.)

Now for tomorrow's big winners, basically what I have figured out from the hour of work I did to prepare for this disaster is that for some reason allegedly after a bit of roadwork near their residence, the plaintiffs' basement had a wee bit of a flood problem everytime that it rained. And when I say wee, I mean that up to six to seven feet of water would collect in their basement whenever it would rain. Now if you live in New York City, you know that if there is water coming in, everything else that collects on the street is coming in with it meaning that these people had various forms of municipal waste like leaves, oil, bottles, and of course, lots of dog shit.

The whole case seems pretty boring and so to spice it up, I think I am just going to ask these people how the flooding affected their ability to have intercourse, a question that is admissible if they are suing for loss of services. This question is probably my favorite question to ask plaintiffs because I can be as specific and get into as much detail as I want to meaning I can ask about frequency before and after, duration before and after, what they did before the accident, and what cannot do anymore. The best part of this question is that it really makes people turn bright red and squirm, and sometimes they will even drop the claim right then and there. I, myself, used to be hesistant to ask these questions, but now hey, if you are going to claim that your love life now blows because of something like a flood in your basement, be prepared for me to find out what kind of kinky shit you were into before you needed to build the damn ark.

Anyway, I guess I got to hit it so that I can have some form of a clear mind by tomorrow morning... time to play attorney... even if it is for one day only.

2 comments:

Greg Tito said...

I can't beleive that you actually ask these people about their sex life? And how can loss of services mean sex unless of course they frequently have sex with prostitutes? And would they admit that to a lawyer?

Rain Delay said...

Actually, Bob Jingle and his impressive legal mind is correct in that loss services makes no sense for what I was writing about. The proper basis for asking these questions about strapping it on is a claim for loss of consortium. In comparison, a claim for loss of services is usually made when a child gets hurt, and the parents lose their ability to use said child for slave labor.