Flying Gavels

By John Cheap Doyle

This read is for curious people who want to see the wizard hiding behind the curtain operating the levers of our legal system.

In Flying Gavels, John Cheap Doyle brings us by his side as he surveys his 41-year career in the US legal system as a civil trial attorney. Many people think that civil law is dull, a

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636768984

John Cheap Doyle

John Cheap Doyle is a California attorney based in Los Angeles with 41 years of civil trial experience. Some highlights include serving as articles editor and published author of the Santa Clara Law Review, working for the U.S. Judicial Service as sole law clerk for a Senior U.S. District Court Judge in Los Angeles. He has also appealed to the California Supreme Court and to the U.S. Supreme Court. Since 1990, he has been an AV Preeminent rated attorney by Martindale Hubbell, a rating awarded to only the top 10% of all attorneys after being vetted by judges and peers for having the highest ethical standards and legal ability.

Book preview

FLYING GAVELS

John Cheap Doyle

new degree press

copyright © 2021 John Cheap Doyle

All rights reserved.

FLYING GAVELS

ISBN

978-1-63676-750-5 Paperback

978-1-63676-899-1 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-898-4 Digital Ebook

For my wife, Mary Lynne Doyle, MD, and my children Eamon Keenan Doyle and Lindsey Karen Doyle. I am grateful for all the love, support, and encouragement you give me.

Contents

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Introduction

PART 1

Ideas and Riddles

Chapter 1

Good Luck with the Riddle

Chapter 2

B.T. Collins

Chapter 3

Decisions, Decisions

PART 2

Clerks

Chapter 4

The Courthouse

Chapter 5

Three-Ring Circus

PART 3

Schooled

Chapter 6

Enlightening Depositions

Chapter 7

District of Columbia

Chapter 8

Witness from the Fringe

Chapter 9

Elvira and the Bentley

PART 4

Surprise

Chapter 10

Bad Faith

Chapter 11

The Five Best Lies

Chapter 12

The Bench

Epilogue

Acknowledgement

Appendix

There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.

—Albert Einstein

Introduction

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This read is for curious people who want to see the wizard hiding behind the curtain operating the levers.

I am a lawyer turned author. I’ve always enjoyed telling stories, which is a key skill for a trial lawyer. I wrote creatively and for journals in college and published in law school. Over the years I have collected experiences that I’ve shared with friends, family, and even unwitting strangers. More times than I can count they have told me, You should write a book.

Where to even start?

Maybe the middle of my career as a civil litigator in Los Angeles. In one case I represented an attorney who was sued for assault and personal injury after driving a vintage Bentley home from a high-end restaurant with four young female staffers.

They had consumed six bottles of wine over dinner to celebrate the graduation of one of the staffers from law school. The plaintiff, who was riding a motorcycle, claimed he was stopped at a red light in front of the restaurant when the defendant bumped the rear tire of his motorcycle repeatedly with the Bentley, finally knocking the motorcycle over, injuring him. The Bentley driver fled the scene, followed by a low-speed chase through the streets of Pasadena until the defendant stopped in a gym parking lot where two weightlifters intervened until the police arrived.

No charges were filed.

It was deemed a civil matter.

One summer, in the middle of a seven-day personal injury jury trial, one of my favorite judges, later elevated to the Court of Appeal, asked counsel to approach the bench at 2:30 p.m. without the court reporter. This is what he said to us: Counsel, surf’s up. My friends tell me it’s really good. Is there any objection to recessing trial until 10:30 tomorrow morning?

I had a highly skilled legal secretary who kept an uncaged full-sized boa constrictor in her apartment bedroom, usually wrapped around one of her bed posts. There was an eight-inch by twelve-inch framed color photograph of her smiling with the reptile’s midsection coiled twice around her forearm. She hung the prized photo on the wall above her work desk.

One time my secretary was late for work reportedly because she woke up that morning to discover that the boa constrictor had coiled itself around her such that she could not remove it, but somehow managed to call the fire department to free her from her pet.

A couple of months later, one of the firm’s partners, who was the firm’s resident class clown, had just won a jury trial and left with another lawyer to celebrate at a local bar around lunchtime on a Friday. The two of them returned just before 5 p.m. in no state to be interacting with staff.

The story I heard from one of the paralegals is that the celebrating partner saw my secretary in her office wearing a red dress. He started singing Lady in Red, stumbled into her office uninvited and fake tripped toward her as she did her best to keep him from hurting himself on her metal file cabinet.

My secretary quit the following Monday and successfully sued the offending partner and the firm for sexual harassment, among other things.

This was one of a series of events that led me to realize that I had to leave and form a new law firm.

One of my law partners was the daughter of the governor of the Delhi Province in India who gave up her life as royalty in a palace full of servants and elephants to become a lawyer in the US and for which she was disinherited after she married a lawyer who was a Sikh.

What’s most amazing is that these stories are true.

While many things have changed in the law biz since I started out, many things have not. There were a lot of unemployed and underemployed young lawyers. They had to work in jobs they didn’t like because they had debt. The competition for good jobs was intense. Many young lawyers had intolerable bosses, boring tasks, and ridiculous hours and wondered frequently why they wanted to do this in the first place.

Although there were times I had bad bosses, got treated poorly, and worked too long on monotonous tasks, my career did not turn out like that. I thought I was suited to be a litigator, but I really didn’t know how to get there. A good portion of it was who I knew, most commonly referred to now as networking.

Add equal parts serendipity, openness to challenges that I wasn’t necessarily qualified to meet, and a willingness to work hard, and voila, I had a career.

Compared to criminal law, most people think practicing civil law would be dull and unexciting, kind of like watching paint dry.

Au contraire.

A civil litigation career is a wild ride, and I am compelled to share the stories I’ve been part of to demonstrate how people in the civil justice system act and the ways they deal with the stresses they experience.

The book will also show how lawyers clean up the messes people make for each other and for themselves. Lawyers give advice about how clients should best handle their legal issues. Sometimes they listen and sometimes they don’t, which often enough leads to comical situations.

This book is based on my experiences over the last forty-five years, starting in law school, clerking for a federal judge, and as a civil litigator for over forty years. I clerked for an irascible elderly federal judge who all the lawyers were afraid of but who was actually fair-minded and sharp as a tack while most of his veteran staff couldn’t stand each other. I’ve worked in a large firm, as a solo practitioner, and everywhere in between.

There were many surprises along the way that caught me off guard. I learned from my investigator, a retired police detective, that a construction worker who sued my client for unwitnessed head trauma on a jobsite was in fact a boxer and a mob enforcer who had jumped bail on a murder charge and who was running drugs off the California coast in a vintage US Army steel tug owned by a dead guy.

While I was handling that case, one of my secretaries embezzled from the firm before we found out too late that she was on parole for embezzling from her prior firm.

Once I represented a diminutive elderly lady who was having trouble hiring a lawyer after several Northern California East Bay newspapers refused to print her full-page ad. So she posted a freeway billboard sign on a billboard she owned emblazoned with her message:

Are there any lawyers out there with balls? Call me at...

I didn’t know about the freeway sign when I agreed to represent her, but I still don’t regret it.

So many adventures.

Once I got to sit across the table from Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist and chat for an hour over lunch before he became Chief Justice.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I want to open people’s eyes to the hidden world of law. Everyone knows about courtroom dramas, but there’s so much that everyday people don’t know that goes on just below the surface in a courtroom, in judge’s chambers, in law offices, and pretty much anywhere legal problems lurk.

This book is written for anyone interested in the things we don’t see in courtroom dramas. It’s for readers who would like to know about the absurdities surrounding real-life court cases and the people in them.

Some of it is friendly; some of it anything but.

The book is also for law students, young lawyers, and even those considering law school. There are some lessons learned that I wish someone had told me about before I got schooled the hard way. There are also unforeseen moments and events that made me grateful for my career choice and validated all the hard work, long hours, and sleepless nights.

So pull back that curtain.

It’s time to meet the wizard.

Part 1

IDEAS AND RIDDLES

Chapter 1

Good Luck with the Riddle

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I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.

~ Albert Einstein

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In the spring of 1976 there were only two pathways to become an elite member of the Santa Clara Law Review. For the fortunate few top law students, it was simply a matter of being invited to an informal interview with a committee including the faculty advisor, editor in chief, and other stakeholders. I had just finished my first year at Santa Clara University School of Law, located in what was quickly becoming known as Silicon Valley because of the tech boom, and I knew I couldn’t stand still if I wanted to get anywhere. I was acutely aware of the respect the legal community held for members of the Law Review.

For those not at the very top of the first-year class who had the energy and ambition, and were able to set aside time, you could try to write onto the Law Review. Among other things you had to produce a publishable note, a relatively short but snappy examination of a legal problem designed to convince the committee that you could produce solid work, thus giving you at least a chance to serve somewhere on the Law Review. Writing on seemed like a great idea to me.

But how to get there?

Five years before law school I played varsity high school football at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, occasionally getting on the field. Loyola was in the waning stage of a football dynasty but was still graduating an occasional Division I scholarship player. Tim Wheeler was our multitalented quarterback and team leader who also landed lead roles in our musicals. I sang in the chorus. We also attended college together at Santa Clara where he got himself elected senior class president. After you spend eight years in school together with shared interests and as teammates you want to help each other out.

In May 1976, I knew Tim was clerking for arguably the top LA personal injury firm led by Browne Greene who was widely known to cause night sweats in opposing counsel. My theory was he slept like a baby while his opponents tossed and turned. Since most of his trials went on for weeks, the wars of attrition always went his way.

Yet, how many times did I hear Browne Greene could sell ice cream to Eskimos, or, He puts on his pants one leg at a time, just like everybody else?

My question is, who would name their kid Browne Greene?

I met Tim for lunch and learned that Browne Greene did not hire summer clerks, only year-round law clerks. He told me he heard that Spray & Delamer was hiring right down the street and suggested I talk to Dick Gunther. Tim knew everyone.

I’m pretty sure Tim talked to Dick because I had no trouble arranging an interview for a summer law clerk job at Spray & Delamer after mailing him a resume and cover letter.

They were an old line medium-sized LA insurance defense firm operating at the top floor of a ’60s mid-rise. From the north-facing windows of their offices you could see downtown skyscrapers just to the right and Good Samaritan Hospital, where I was born, across the street.

In preparation, I had purchased an affordable three-piece beige suit and leather shoes. The interview consisted of a very brief chat, if you want to call it that, with the firm’s managing partner, Richard M. Gunther. Just outside his door were two large leather litigation briefcases used by trial lawyers to transport large volumes of paperwork to and from the courthouse, typically with the firm name embossed in gold on the front.

The door was open, so, after sidestepping the briefcases, I stopped at the threshold, leaned in, and knocked on the open door. It was a big office by defense firm standards with wood paneling and a massive desk. Gunther was standing in front of his desk dressed in a cream-colored long sleeve shirt with a dark red bow tie and suspenders.

Good afternoon, Mr. Gunther. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

He gave me a firm handshake and then looked down, craning his neck to see over his reading glasses, eyebrows raised and forehead furrowed. He pointed at my feet with his outstretched right arm.

Where did you find those? They’re the ugliest shoes I’ve ever seen!

I looked down and noticed that my shoes looked a lot like his. I replied:

Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.

Dick hinted at a smile and motioned for me to take a seat while he walked around to sit in his desk chair.

So you went to Loyola High, then Santa Clara for both undergrad and law school. You know that makes you a lifer, right? And now you want to work as a summer law clerk here at my firm? Why would I want to hire you?

I said, Before I make my pitch, I want to pick your brain, if that’s okay.

It probably won’t help your chances here, but go ahead.

I’m going to write onto the Law Review and I’m looking for a topic that would be of interest to you and other lawyers in civil practice. Are there any big questions that you’d like answers to?

His chair squeaked as he leaned forward and placed both of his hands flat on the desktop across from me as he seemed to look blankly at the resume in front of him for maybe five seconds.

"Yeah, there’s a question all right. What the hell are we supposed to do with American Motorcycle?"¹

American Motorcycle, I later learned, was an enigmatic, groundbreaking case