Lawyers see some incredible highs and terrific lows on a daily basis—but nothing compares to these horrible clients. These legal Redditors confessed the worst clients they ever had.
1. Does Double Jeopardy Apply Here?
I’m a legal assistant. We got a client off on a charge after a man “mysteriously” died. Two weeks later she was caught with a similar weapon and situation, except this time, the guy survived.
2. Doing The Right Thing
My managing partner was the monster here. The client was a senile 90-year-old man. He wanted to sell land worth a little less than a billion dollars to some businessmen. Suffice it to say, there were many who wanted to take advantage of the situation.
One such person, to my dismay, was our managing partner. His actions were disgusting. The partner wanted to insert a provision that would have effectively funneled about 60% of the proceeds solely to him. You could see how his eyes gleamed at the mere mention of money.
The provision "got lost in the revisions”. I was doing the revisions. I'm no longer part of that scummy firm.
3. Thanks But No Thanks
My general psychology professor worked for the state of Arkansas assessing criminals to see if they would qualify as insane. He told us a story one time about a guy who would get glass shards and hide them underneath his skin, presumably to use at a more opportune time.
He said his interview with the guy made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
4. Gross AND Stupid
We had a client try to enforce a post-employment restraint against a 19-year-old receptionist after she quit and started working for a competitor. His reason shocked me. He wanted to "ruin her life” because she wouldn't sleep with him, a creepy 57-year-old man.
Him trying to sleep with her was the reason she quit. Unsurprisingly, he didn't take our advice to discontinue his claim and so we ended up sending him elsewhere.
5. What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
She tried to sell her baby. I found out during a hearing, in front of the judge.
6. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
I had a divorce client, husband and father, who disowned his autistic son. But he got even more disturbing. He tried to argue that he should get all of his wife's retirement having not worked for 12 years.
He also contacted me during the height of hurricane Sandy (he was in the Bronx and me in Manhattan), saying he wanted to hold his wife in contempt for not paying him that day while the storm slammed NYC.
He told me I was making a huge mistake getting married (my wedding date was November 3rd, four days after Sandy) saying that I was going to be miserable and regret it…I could go on. The worse came several months later. Since his divorce was taking a long time, he sent threatening letters to myself and my wife.
In it, he claimed he had hired an "executor" to go after the two of us if his divorce wasn't finalized in 60 days. We called the authorities, and they said he left his premises one day earlier. I heard nothing from him until February 2014, when he emailed me saying he needed a winter coat from his wife and could I help get it for him.
7. You’ll Need A Holiday From This Client
Memorial day weekend always reminds me of not my worst client, but definitely my dumbest. I was representing her on a child custody and child support matter. She was calling me on Memorial day saying she really needed to speak to me.
I called her back and asked if it was urgent since it was Memorial day and all. She said: “Oh, I didn't think that Jews celebrated Memorial day, so I thought you were going to be available”.
8. Don’t Trust This Woman
This client of mine, an executive, got in serious trouble because she said she was firing any employee who had a serious illness or injury. This was while promoting fundraisers at a local church for cancer sufferers, no less.
During this time, employees, thinking she'd be sympathetic, began revealing their confidential health information to her.
9. Some People Never Learn
I won a drinking and getting on the road case because the government messed up on something right before trial was to begin. A technicality, basically. After we found out the charges were dropped, I made a bone-chilling discovery. My client gives me a hug and COMPLETELY reeks of alcohol.
He has driven to court. I took his keys and called his mother.
10. Don’t Take What This Doctor Ordered
I had a client who pretended to be a doctor so he could sell various bogus medications to people. According to the prosecutors, he also had numerous clients who were made to believe that his medicine would cure their cancer.
They paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars and some of them didn’t make it. I just thought that was pure evil.
11. Can’t Lie Your Way Out Of This One
I defended my client in a lawsuit after he defrauded his business partners. The evidence was already overwhelming that my client was liable. However, the client made matters worse by fabricating evidence and then presenting it in court.
He got called out on it by the opposing attorney who had the same evidence. It tanked my client’s case. My client continued lying to me despite the overwhelming evidence showing he fabricated evidence. He lost, big.
In addition to a large judgment, he got hit with several felonies for fabricating evidence. Also, the business partners my client screwed over were his dad and brother.
12. Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children?
I read about a case where the wife was trying to take half of a guy’s business and millions in personal assets, only to find out that the business had been moved into his sons’ name years earlier. The result was pure karma. The guy donated all their savings, millions of dollars, to a children’s hospital in his soon-to-be ex-wife's name so she couldn't get the money.
The judge said what he did was technically allowed since it was community property and no freeze had been placed on it yet, but was morally unconscionable. The lawyer said in his entire life he never saw a bigger smile on a man’s face. He just kept saying "I just wanted to help the children" and smiling.
13. The Truth And Nothing But The Truth
My partner’s mother was horrible. She frequently hit her husband, was a compulsive liar, and just generally made her family miserable. When they were settling the divorce, the judge initially deemed a testimony from the kids (my girlfriend and her brother) unnecessary, probably because they were minors at the time and testifying against one of their parents would be hard on them, to say the least.
However, the lawyer representing the mother was really insistent that they testify. This turned out to be an enormous mistake. It must've been a shock to the lawyer to suddenly have two more witnesses with dozens of accounts of all the horrible things she did.
We figured the mother must've lied to her lawyer about some significant details, because they were completely caught off guard and more than a little angry after the testimony. We like to believe it helped solidify some of the charges placed against her.
It was a nice bit of karma after years and years of gaslighting and false rumors, that her own lies got her caught.
14. Money Isn’t Everything
My first internship in law school was at a matrimonial firm in a very wealthy area. Think millionaires and billionaires getting divorced. One of the first cases I worked on involved the parents of a victim of a high-profile shooting at a school.
The parents were divorced and had been prior to the passing of the child and were now battling over who would get the victim's compensation fund money and the funds they received from a fundraiser they set up themselves on a GoFundMe-type site.
These were incredibly wealthy people fighting over what was literal chump change to them and asking the public to donate to them as if they needed it. They were so clearly exploiting the tragic passing of their child for money and to tick off the other parent.
It was honestly one of the most disturbing things I have encountered, ever.
15. Dirty Money
This was a divorce. The client is a late 30s woman, two kids, idyllic suburban life with her husband who was in an incredibly lucrative medical profession. He caught her cheating. He wanted to patch things up, but she decided on a divorce.
So far nothing out of the ordinary, unfortunately. Then I start getting the chilling details. He caught her on his birthday. In their bed. While the kids were downstairs. The husband decided to come home early as a surprise, and his wife was getting down with a 19-year-old.
But wait...There's more really fun stuff from the husband. The guy had been treated for a transmitted disease twice, and both times he had caught it from his wife. The second kid wasn't his, it was obvious because the child was 100% one race and the “dad” was not that race.
Bad stuff, right? Well, enter the texts, e-mails, etc. She was carrying on like a dozen affairs at any given time. Spanning years. She would bring them home and tell the kids they were electricians, plumbers, etc.
She’d hit up other guys within minutes of dropping her kids off at school. I've met some awful people in my time, but this woman straight up told me how much this guy loved her and how she manipulated the heck out of him.
The husband knew about a lot of the stuff, and each time he found something new he just tried to win her back. I don't want to go into the details of what happened, but some money that you get, you don't really want.
16. A Hollow Victory
I had a client who was getting divorced. The client and soon-to-be ex-spouse had a 12-year-old son with Autism. The two of them sat this poor child down at the table one day and made him choose which parent he wanted to live with.
Our client called me to gloat that the child had chosen in their favor and to direct that paperwork be prepared. This client was a prominent member of the business community and earned quite a high salary, and was treating this child like a commodity.
I was disgusted. I no longer work in law, but this one will always stick with me.
17. Patience Is A Virtue
Not a lawyer, but this happened with a client of one I overheard a case for. This woman, wanting her US citizenship, married an older man who was never “hands on”. Basically, when the man went to file taxes he had someone do it for him. So she made a deal with this person.
They transferred his entire estate and accounts to her. There was one big problem. Her citizenship hadn't been fully established, as this was roughly a week into the false marriage. All of the older gentleman's money and assets were frozen because a foreign citizen now “owned” them.
The case is still stuck in lawyer limbo and I don’t know what happened later.
18. It’s Always The Ones You Least Suspect
Civil defense lawyer here. Some of the work I do is employment defense, particularly harrassment and discrimination cases. I’m pretty cynical and see a lot of cases where plaintiffs are full of it.
In one case, I was defending a company and that company’s manager, jointly. The manager seemed like a straight-up guy, and I pride myself in being a good judge of character. I was pretty convinced the case was just payback from a disgruntled employee.
To my credit, the plaintiff, a 38-year-old female, was a really poor employee by all accounts. Still, it didn’t prepare me from what I found. I was doing a review of every email the company had stored on their servers.
Not only did this guy stick his hand down this woman’s shirt without consent, when she threatened to go to HR, he said he’d get her fired and make sure she never got a job again. The lady was a single mother with 3 kids. He also propositioned her in exchange for a day off.
He thought the email had been wiped because the company had a one-year retention policy. Apparently, some of the company’s older emails remained on a server before the policy was put in place. I had to substitute out of the case thereafter for conflict reasons since my two clients’ interests were no longer aligned.
19. By The Book
About two months ago, one of my clients picked up a statute book off the defense table and knocked me over the head with it during a probation hearing. That wasn't a great day at work.
20. A New Career Path
My dad is a lawyer, and he once told me the story of why he stopped being a defense lawyer. He got a case with a couple young Russian guys who were charged with securities fraud. My dad worked super hard on the case and got the guys a great deal with some probation, a fine, and some community service.
That night the guys treated my dad to dinner, and on the TV in the bar was a news story about insurance scamming. One of the guys said, “Hey guys security old news, let’s try that next,” and pointed at the TV.
That night my dad came home to my mom and said “I can’t do defense anymore” because he realized the people he was defending were truly bad people.
21. Drive My Car
A husband and wife were getting divorced. There was a classic car—Ferrari, Jaguar or something like that—involved that was worth a lot of money. It was a bone of contention in the divorce.
After several months, the husband finally proposes that he will let her have the car if she gives him the house. She agrees. Then, I come to find out he had been taking the car out every day and doing loops around the city for hours, putting thousands of miles on it and making it worth nothing.
22. I Do What I Want
I'm a retired Corrections Officer from NYC (Rikers Island). I once had an inmate ask me to look at his case. I had once gotten a 100% innocent guy out of the clinker. This was when I had just started and I was considered one of the “smarter” COs.
This guy fatally shot another man at an ATM in midtown Manhattan. It was all caught on videotape. The FBI had computer-enhanced one frame from the video, in which the suspect’s head was in full profile. His right ear was clearly seen and had a very distinctive characteristic.
It was sort of square at the top and not rounded at all. His crooked, broken nose was all I needed to say to myself he's guilty. What messed my mind up, though, was that this piece of garbage was telling me he had every right to shoot the victim.
He looked at himself as a professional. If you resisted when he wanted the money, then he felt justified in messing you up. In this case, he shot the ATM customer because he tried to fight back. I couldn't believe how this guy was behaving, smiling when he told me he "was a professional". He did not get off.
23. Thank You For Your Service
As a law intern, I had to prepare a defense for a huge government corporation who had denied employment to a man who applied on compassionate grounds. It’s a government policy in my country where, if an employee dies during their term, then their nearest relative is entitled to get employment in the same company.
This man's father had passed at age 60 after working there all his life. His son got done so dirty. The corporation was rejecting his claim on a mere technical issue that there was a spelling error in some of his ID documents.
24. And You Ain’t A Good Person
During a mediation conference, my client bragged about continuing to physically discipline her pregnant teenage daughter justifying it because “her face ain’t pregnant”.
25. One Rotten Town
I was a detention officer and bailiff for a small town at the time this took place. We had a guy, a member of the largest church's elders, and all around "great guy" with money and a big house. Well, he got brought up on charges for trying to off his wife.
He wept, and prayed, and generally was the picture perfect "wrongfully accused" sort. He'd sniffle to me requests for a bible or religious tracts from his cell, all "God bless you" and tearful thanks. Half the town showed up to the courthouse for his bond hearing.
It turned into a total circus, where the 100+ people crammed into a room meant for 50. They hissed and booed the prosecutor every time she tried to read the charges and evidence against him, while raucously cheering the defense when he made counterpoints.
Zero decorum or order. The guy got released to go back to work for almost nothing when regular bail would have been set at something like $500k. Well, I had access to his history, as well as the evidence against him.
I looked him up. I couldn’t believe what I found. He had a long, looooong history of escalating aggression with multiple prior spouses in a few other states. He'd done time multiple times for it. This time, he'd basically abducted his own wife in a vehicle.
She threw herself from the moving vehicle, ran to a farmhouse 400 yards away barefoot in -5 degree weather, and luckily they answered the door to let her in. She was terrified as he drove circles around the house looking for her, and officers were called.
In the 9-1-1 call you can hear her screaming at the two old people to run and leave her so he will just get her and not them too. The authorities detained him as he was hammering on the door, screaming that he was going to get her sooner or later and if she ran she would just tire herself out before the inevitable end.
Long story short, he got off with a minor assault charge (misdemeanor), which all the naive baby boomer wanna-do-gooders in court that day believed is a travesty and blame on the woman. His defense is that while he was with us, she cleaned out his bank account and the entire thing was a setup to take his money.
She had no income and used the joint account to pay medical bills and flee the state. All the church-marms and assorted rubber-neckers involved claim she was always a loose woman and just set him up to use him, and maybe he did slap her a bit, but only because her loose and unwomanly behavior pushed him over the edge.
The ultimate worst part is, I cannot legally tell anyone the truth without being at a huge liability, and nobody would believe me anyways. I had to sit through circus after kangaroo court circus, biting my tongue while that filthy snake plead down to a misdemeanor and half the town cheered about it like it was a soap opera.
At one point I looked at the judge, whom I know very well as a neighbor. His face terrified me. The look in his eyes was like, "This is screwed up, but I don’t want a mob to form, so to heck with it”. His lawyer also knew he was guilty as sin and is a dangerous sociopath, but also knew that freeing him would ingratiate them with the town.
Wouldn’t you know it? This lawyer is running for commissioner next election. I'm no longer in law enforcement, and I'm moving as soon as finances allow.
26. Little Monster
I was a prosecutor at the state attorney’s office in Miami. There was this 15-year-old kid when I was working in the juvenile division that still haunts me. I remember his face even now because he had two distinct tattoos on it, with very bloodshot eyes.
He was detained by police after chasing after a teenage girl with a Gatorade bottle. Turns out the girl worked at a gas station and had called officers a week earlier because the boy was sitting outside staring at her.
He had come back a week later, walked into the store, and taken a Gatorade in front of her without a word. He then dumped it outside, pushed a patron away, and poured gasoline in the bottle. Then he started walking back towards the attendant.
She freaks out and starts running out the store. He comes in, gets a lighter, and starts chasing after her. He runs right into two patrol officers, thank God. Just looking at him in court freaked me out, which was unusual, to say the least.
He seemed completely hollow inside, showed absolutely zero emotions, and didn’t say a single word at any stage, even after sentencing. 5 years later, I was watching the First 48 and saw the kid’s mugshot at the end, with the same tattoos. He had gotten nabbed for a fatal home invasion.
27. A Little Too Good At His Job
This was after I left practice in the UK and temporarily went back to my home country to work for a bit. My client was in the mob and threw two grenades under the car of a rival. Officers storm his place with no evidence, warrant, or reasonable suspicion.
These idiots didn't think to go through the proper formalities before making their move. So the client calls me. I show up at station. The client is walking out a free man to have a gab with me in about 15-20 minutes.
He says he heard through the grapevine that the rival (who actually wasn't in the car when it blew up) had an adult son who decided to be a fool and give the officers an anonymous tip instead of letting his father deal with it.
Three days later, I see in the headlines "*RIVAL’S* HOUSE EXPLODES IN MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES. FORENSICS SAY EVIDENCE AT SCENE INCONCLUSIVE". I forwarded it to my client and he just replies, ";)”.
28. Smile For The Camera
My worst client was a woman who was rude, aggressive, argumentative, and paranoid. She thought everyone was out to get her. She had a terminal illness and still acted like a total witch. I represented her in 3 separate civil cases.
She had gone through 2 lawyers already who dropped her. At one point, even the judge had talked to me in his chambers after a hearing to advise me on how to deal with her. But I realized she was truly a monster at a bizarre moment. It was when I had to present her for direct testimony and cross exam, before a different judge in a separate case.
Incredibly, she was probably one of the best witnesses I had ever presented. I had been dreading presenting her because her demeanor could subconsciously influence the judge’s mind. Surprisingly, she answered all the questions briefly and directly.
She was empathetic, and she handled the cross examination like a pro. I almost felt sorry for her. It was like she was a totally different person on the witness stand. The way she was able to act convincingly like a decent human being, knowing she was really a bad person, showed me how much of a psycho she was.
29. You Can’t Always Choose Your Clients
I was doing some pro bono work for an aid clinic very soon after I was licensed. You get to practice all different areas of law, so it’s great for learning, and the clients get free help. They gave me this very easy case to dip my toes in on.
It was a simple eviction. My clients have received notice to get out for nonpayment of rent. I meet with them and they’re basically Honey Boo Boo’s parents, except also with every negative “people of Walmart” stereotype you can think of: very entitled and aggressive, depressingly young but with a flock of children already.
The wife says she’s disabled so she can’t work, and as part of my client intake I ask what kind of disability she has in case it might be relevant or we could provide more assistance. She looks me straight in the eye and says “I don’t read good”.
Knowing that, I make sure to read out anything I ask them to sign and try to make sure they understand the process. The gist of the case was they were living in a trailer home on some guy’s property, and had stopped paying rent several months ago. I forget their reasons, but it was more “the landlord is a jerk” than anything actionable.
The landlord has left them a notice to get out and actually filed for eviction. I immediately notice that the letter from the landlord is defective. He doesn’t include some things he should have and had not waited the required time period to give them a chance to pay and stay before filing in court. So basically, this is going to be super easy to get dismissed.
However, they really don’t have any grounds to ultimately challenge an eviction on (place is habitable, etc), so whatever I do now is still just a band-aid to give them more time to get rent together or find a new place. I explain this several times and stress that they will need to either move out or pay back their rent.
Court day comes and it’s in a rural county almost an hour away. We wait, our case gets called, and we go straight up to the bench to talk to the judge. This frail old man stands, shakily holding some wrinkled loose papers, and slowly shuffles to the bench. I realize this is the landlord. This is when I start to feel sick.
The second he gets up there and the judge asks him to speak, my clients start loudly arguing and shouting over him. I have to remind them to shut up. The landlord explains that he’s illiterate and had to have a neighbor write the notice for him, and adds that these tenants are horrible people and have been harassing him and his daughter.
The judge asks for our side, and my idiot clients both start shouting again. I finally get them to shut up and say, “Your honor, the notice was defective, we motion to dismiss,” and hand him my motion. This poor judge’s face lights up at an actual argument being presented and he quickly skims my motion.
He immediately rules in our favor, explains to the landlord that he will need to start the process over (give them new notice, wait 20 days, refile and repay the filing fee), then turns to my clients, who have the biggest grins, and sternly tells them the same thing I had: That this doesn’t do anything but delay their eviction.
We go to leave and I feel god-awful watching the landlord dejectedly slump away as I walk back to my car. I’m already thinking screw these people, I’m not helping them again. I had been very clear in my client agreement that my representation was only for this one court appearance, thankfully.
Then I hear them hooting and jeering. I turn to look and they have rolled down their truck windows and are shouting the most vile stuff at this old man as he fumbles to get into his vehicle, including nasty things about his daughter.
They tear out of the parking lot cheering like their team won the Super Bowl, and on the long drive back, I realize a career in this is not for me.
30. A Real Monster-In-Law
Years ago, I worked at a defense firm. The lawyers I worked for were very selective of the cases they took on, but they still saw a lot of horrors. Mostly I felt sorry for the clients and their families—but there was one woman who was evil.
She tried to hire a hitman to off her son-in-law. Just looking at her, and without knowing what she did, she sets off the vibe of a manipulative control freak. Watch out for overbearing mothers-in-law, people.
31. Gotta Protect The Big Guys
I've spent my career in property law. By and large, I would say that in civil law you don't meet monsters so much as realize that the real monster is often the whole way the law, or even society in general, works.
Very early on, as a trainee doing a stint in employment law, I remember attending a meeting with a senior guy at some company that ran nursing homes and that was a client of the firm. Naturally, they employed loads of poorly paid, often female staff.
The main thing they were interested in was making sure that the workforce didn't get unionized and that the company didn't have to recognize unions. They did not want to have to pay their staff more or improve their conditions.
Not against the law, of course, and the people involved weren't personally evil, but to do what they were doing required them to be bad guys.
32. It Doesn’t Get More Petty Than Divorce Court
This divorce client of mine owed his ex-wife $500 as part of the settlement. His revenge was brutal. He brought two buckets of unsorted coins (mostly pennies) to our office. But she wasn’t any better: She took the light bulbs out of every fixture when she moved out, then refused to give him right of first refusal if she wanted to get rid of their dog.
33. Do You Know Who I Am?
I had a victim client we represented who was a total jerk. He was a billionaire who was swindled by his secretary. He called several times a day, screaming at us, and we had to basically act as his servants.
During his hearing, the judge asked him how he could not have noticed one time that 10k dollars had disappeared from his bank account. He said that 10k is nothing for someone who has millions.
The judge was not impressed by the statement and our guy lost that one. Be aware that we prep clients before hearings, but I guess he wanted to do his show.
34. I Don’t Need To Hear That Right Now
My grandpa was defending 1 of 4 clients in a case involving a burglary of a jewelry store. During the trial, the store worker was speaking as a witness when my grandpa's client leaned in and whispered, "I should have shot him”.
35. A Little Nest Egg
I was volunteering at a court free family law assistance program. I helped people fill out family law court forms, basically. One of the clients straight-up asked us how to hide money from her husband who she wanted to divorce.
That is against the law to do during a divorce proceeding, and I told her if she does that she risks losing every dime of her hidden money to her husband. She didn't want to hear that and kept trying to ask if there was a way to hide the money regardless.
I got one of the actual attorneys in the clinic in hopes they could make the woman listen to reason. She was in the lawyer's office for a while, but I don't think she ever actually listened to our statements telling her not to do it.
36. It’s Exactly What It Looks Like
I was a juror on a case. We had to listen to secret tapes of the defendant arranging the offings of all of the witnesses. The defense was mind-blowingly stupid. The defense attorney had to act as if the defendant was trying to create his own sting to bring down a hitman. Yeah, right.
Oh did I mention that all of the remaining witnesses that testified had recently been in "accidents" or had forgotten everything? I wondered how that defense lawyer could take himself seriously.
37. Give Nothing, Get Nothing Back
My client said that it was an outrage and disgusting that he was being chased for income tax by the government. He had earned about $20m a year during the relevant period and had probably paid less tax than the kind lady who had come to the meeting room to provide us with tea and coffee.
38. Not A Healthy System
I had a client who engaged in a major corruption and bid rigging agreement in my country. All of this was regarding bids in the public health care system. The companies that entered the agreement were overpricing medical equipment, to the point where public hospitals could not afford to provide basic tests for the public.
Seeing people affected by the companies in the local news after this became public made me realize how harmful this was to the poor, who could not afford private treatment. I passed the case to a co-worker.
39. The Price Of A Song
My client owned a little bar in a small town. It wasn’t a dive bar exactly but certainly not high-end. What started as a normal weekend soon turned into a nightmare. One that I got pulled right into. So, he decided to host a karaoke night one weekend.
Lots of people came, drank a bunch, and sang terribly. The thing is, come Monday morning, there was a problem. He didn’t have the proper copyright license to have those songs performed in his bar, and the music company had an undercover person there, so they sued that monster for all he was worth.
The named plaintiffs included Sheryl Crow and Jimmy Buffet. Thankfully he settled, sold the bar shortly thereafter, and has not offended since.
40. From Bad To Worse
I’m a paralegal for a personal injury/worker’s compensation firm. We have three clients who were involved in the same motor vehicle accident. Two are exes that share two children together, having split since the accident.
The mother has opened an investigation against the father. She found out he had been mistreating their two sons, one with a pretty severe social disorder. However, about two months ago she was driving around dusk when she fatally struck a bicyclist.
She fled the scene because she was driving with no insurance and a suspended license. The result was devastating. She’s behind bars now, and the kids are back with the father because the investigation was “inconclusive”. Honestly just sad for everyone involved.
41. Keeping It In The Family
I had a cousin who was a criminal lawyer. However, he quit when another cousin asked him to defend him because he had hit an old lady over the head and robbed her. They had CCTV footage and it was a guaranteed sentence.
Even so, the cousin claimed it wasn’t him in the CCTV, but someone else. My lawyer cousin said he jumped over the desk and punched him. He now does business law.
Krakenimages.com ,Shutterstock
42. The Worst Kind Of Voyeur
I once had a client who took it upon himself to install surveillance software on the personal devices of his employees. Once they left, he would monitor their emails and accounts in an attempt to blackmail them.
I was able to get him off and he now works for the insurance industry. I shudder to think what he does to people now. Such an absolute piece of trash. I can only hope someone finally brings him to justice.
43. So Much For Objectivity
For a year, I worked for the most unethical attorney I have ever met. He took on a client who was injured at work and sent him to a doctor that was in his pocket. Since this attorney normally does defense work, the doctor came back saying the injury was clearly not work-related—since he thought this was what the attorney wanted him to say.
The attorney called the doctor to inform him that he represented the employee and not the employer in this case. The doctor then wrote a report that the injury was clearly work related. Oh, and this guy tried to fine me $5,000 for going to a doctor's appointment on my lunch break. At that point, I literally walked out.
44. Justice Can Take A While
My parents got caught up in a slimy lawyer's talons. Basically, they had carpet installed in their house in 2005, paid in cash, got a receipt, and went on with their lives. 7 years later, they get a letter from some firm saying that the company they'd had install their carpet never received payment and would press charges if they didn't pay up.
My dad, being the paranoid guy he is, had kept the receipt and said he'd see them in court. He then did some research, found out what the attorney can and can't do in this situation, and also found out that the attorney had been working with the flooring company for years, accusing paying customers of not paying and collecting excess money from them under threat of lawsuit.
Fast-forward to the court date. My dad shows up knowing his rights, with the receipt stating exactly how much he paid and when. The attorney has nothing except a copy of the invoice for my dad's payment that he leaves in his folder the whole time.
Not only does the attorney break almost every rule of court possible, he completely slanders my dad. Calling him "sketchy looking" and "dishonest" even though the receipt is literally right there in front of him. He insists that the receipt is fake despite having a copy of the invoice, really awful stuff. But the end was the most horrible.
Believe it or not, my dad lost that case. Then, before anyone had even left the courtroom, the attorney walked up to chat with the judge, who asked if they were still on for brunch tomorrow. Because it was a super small circuit, this dude had been able to buddy up to a judge to the extent he was allowed to do basically whatever he wanted and still win his cases.
A year later, my parents sued the attorney for misconduct and requested an out-of-circuit judge, who essentially told that slimy schmuck to sit down and shut up when he tried to pull something against the rules. They won that case.
45. Now That Is Low
My client got caught cheating on his wife. He wanted a divorce but didn’t have it in him to tell her…so he asked me to inform her that he was filing for divorce two days after she had his child.
46. Not Worth It
One time, a wife asked me to defend her in a case. Her husband had accused her of buying a house—in her name, with his money, while he was on a business trip. The wife then moved out to that house with her affair partner and filed for divorce.
When I finished reading the file, I asked her for her version of the facts. Welp. She just confirmed all of them, with no remorse. My jaw dropped. I thought, "If I take this case, I need to at least let the pay be worth the trauma of defending her".
When she asked how much would cost her to hire me, I said an amount four times what I would normally charge. She never called, and to be honest I’m glad she didn’t.
47. I Don’t Want To Live In This World Anymore
I started out working for a commercial firm, advising companies on environmental compliance. We had a client who was a large oil and gas distributor that owned a contaminated site in a populated area. Our solution made the hairs raise on my neck. My boss advised the client to transfer ownership of the site to a newly incorporated limited liability company with no assets.
That way, when the government ordered the site to be remediated, the client wouldn't be liable for the clean-up. I left not too long after that.
48. Double Dipping
I work in the court system. One case that came in was a couple divorcing on mutual terms. The husband had one child with her and the wife had a child from the previous marriage. He agreed to pay child support for both children, I guess he really cared about this other one enough to support her even though it isn’t his obligation.
The judge signs the order and they go to set up the child support account. It gets kicked back saying you can’t have two accounts for one child. It revealed her darkest secret. Turns out she’s been collecting child support from the biological father the entire time and never told him.
She basically tried to milk two fathers for one child...and, oh, her attorney knew about it.
49. Digging Up The Past
I represented a guy in a child custody case. He wanted me to hammer on the fact that the mother was unfit because her other child had perished in a tragic accident on a playground. She was a totally decent person and I liked her way more than I liked my client.
50. A Very Expensive Mistake
My ex had 7 lawyers during our divorce proceedings. The first 6 fired her. Finally we got to trial day and they started to negotiate (which she would not do up until then). Her lawyer would shuttle back and forth between us and her.
At one point we were talking about a couple of points and he blurted out, “Screw her you can have them, she’ll never know the difference”. He only took her because she paid a very heavy fee up front. Which she did by getting a new credit card with a pretty high limit…before declaring bankruptcy the next week.
And yes, I know it doesn’t say a lot about my judgement that I married her. But we all make mistakes.
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