War Stories: That Time a Lawyer Threatened to Throw Stewart Out a Window

And some really damaging testimony was coming out from this treating physician and the lawyer John basically on the record with the video running threatened to throw me out of the window of this 28th floor building because he was so angry and irate about that deposition so again I'm gonna tell one of my stories about first starting out practicing law you basically take anything that will come in the door when you're a young lawyer because you're starving and you you want to get the trial experience that you need to become a better lawyer and the problem is how do you find people willing to give you a case so you're generally gonna get cases that probably aren't all that valuable to begin with but that's okay that's how you start out that's how you build a practice so I had a lady walk into my practice one day and tell me that she had a surgical implant a device put into her vaginal space because of stress urinary incontinence that she was going through and of course I was like thinking I've never dealt with anything from a Nana me standpoint I don't know about this I don't know how to even handle a case like this so I jotted down some notes from her and kind of understood what was going on for her from a pain standpoint how she lived in daily pain every time she moved it didn't sound right to me how you could have this surgery and then have all this pain come from it when the surgery was meant to address something as simple as stress urinary incontinence so I called all of the big lawyers I could find in Los Angeles that dealt with these kind of cases I mean I called probably 10 lawyers and left messages saying oh hey I've got this case and and I don't know how to handle it I just want to give it to you so that you can you know help this poor lady out I didn't get one phone call back and it's probably because I'm a young lawyer nobody knows who I am and he was also at the beginning of the litigation of what we learned later to be vaginal mesh litigation it was not big yet this was back in 2006 or 7 that this this lady came into my office so I totally I'm sorry but I couldn't find anybody to take your case and she said Stewart will you take my case and I said whoa I said you're asking I mean I don't know anything about this area of the law I don't even know what to do she says if no one will help me I will I will trust you to do it and I said fine I you know I really thank you for that I'll take the case and inside I was trembling because I didn't know what to do next so a lot of research a lot of googling online research learning about what the stress urinary incontinence was what vaginal mesh was how it was supposed to help people and I even looked at some of the surgeries online I learned about it filed the complaint is a civil complaint in a civil court house and I got an answer to that civil complaint and it was by a very large law firm a multinational offer meaning this law firm is all across the globe and they're out of Los Angeles and one of their offices is out of Los Angeles they're all over the place and they answered the case and I got a phone call from the lawyer at that time who was handling the case he was a young partner at this firm he'd been a partner for a couple years but he called me and the first thing he said to me is you really don't know what you're doing here do you and I just totally know I don't know what I'm doing here I mean I'm gonna be I'm gonna be honest about this I don't know what I'm doing so I say you have all the advantages and I was trying to kind of shift shift it back to him to make him feel a little pressure that well I mean obviously learn it as he is or have as much trial experience as he did I wanted to basically say I'm a rookie and so you have all the advantages and so if I started to win anything here I wanted him to fill a little bit of that pressure his name just for sake of this video was call him John so John basically told me I he kind of chuckled at me and then he said where are you gonna go with this case and I said well I'm gonna do some rent discovery and then we're going to take some depositions so we did some written discovery and there was a question I had asked them it's called 15.1 under the judicial council form for form interrogatories and I sent it off to them and they basically told me to pounce and and I really didn't know what to do next here so I did we call a meeting a requirement Mac and I said hey I think you have to answer this interrogatory I mean I'm the new lawyer here but I think you was the older lawyer know that you gotta answer this so he gave me a second answer and it wasn't any better than the first and so I sent him another letter saying no no you're gonna have to answer this for me and again I'm just this young idealistic lawyer thinking that when you send 15.1 to the other side they just answer it right but he wasn't answering it so I called a friend that an acquaintance that had some experience in these cases and that person said hey file a motion to compel so I filed a motion to compel in the in the civil court and the hearing day came and this John attorney showed up and said all the reasons why they didn't have to answer and the judge disagreed with John said you got to answer 15.1 and sanctioned John's law firm for not answering the question I didn't even fully understand how sanctions worked I asked for them because it was in the forum model that I had received when I brought my motion to compel sure enough to George the the judge sanctioned him come a couple months later Oh first of all today in that he did respond a 15.1 and I got some very good stuff in that case because of that so then I decided to take some depositions and I really didn't know how to do depositions all that well I'd done a few of them but I went ahead and filed or requested that this big company that had made this some of this mesh manufacturing stuff and Matt had manufactured this polypropylene mesh I wanted them to put their person most knowledgeable in the deposition seat so I could ask them about what were the warnings that were included with this mesh and were those warnings communicated to physicians number one and where they communicated from the physicians then to the patient before the patients had this stuff implanted so I show up to the deposition of this person and there's like nine attorneys there's this big conference room table I still remember it was huge it must have been 50 chairs at this conference room table that's downtown LA it's a it's swanky firm I walk in and there's nine attorneys sitting across the table from me and they're all in really nice suits and they all have gray hair because they've been doing this many many years and they're all staring at me and I this I don't talk about this too often but I was in the military right out of high school for four years and I was a did a year in Korea in the second Infantry Division and I also will then went to the 82nd Airborne Division where I was a paratrooper and I remember the 82nd we were always taught that when you have don't have enough resources to do a task or to complete a mission you figure it out doesn't matter you figure it out you go in there and if that means you have to go faced nine people at a deposition and you're a little little attorney that doesn't have a whole lot of experience that's what you do and so I went in there I was certainly nervous as I saw them on the other side but I knew that I was there to fight for my client and I sat down and I took this person's most most knowledgeable deposition and sometimes I'd ask questions and it was it was wrong it was a quite the question didn't come quite out right at what didn't sound educated or like I had knowledge of the mesh material and the nine over there would snicker they'd snicker a little bit they'd laugh during the deposition and I remember thinking you know maybe I'm asking this wrong I'll tell you today the one thing I learned from that was I learned more from that deposition by asking wrong questions which the deponent was so happy to correct me in fact she enjoyed correcting me because she thought it made me feel bad but it educated me on that case it made me a better lawyer in that case to have her correct me to have these guys snickering at my questions made me formulate better questions and do a better job in that deposition so I'll end this with there was one other deposition in that case where the lawyer John who had been sanctioned by the court he was we took a deposition at they're at their downtown office which is like a 28th floor of this high-rise building in Los Angeles and I started asking a treating physician in this case a doctor that had treated my client I started asking him some questions about the mesh and some really damaging testimony was coming out from this treating physician and the lawyer John basically on the record with the video running threatened to throw me out of the window of this 28th floor building because he was so angry and irate about that deposition long story short for this one and I'm sorry about the long story this worked out really well for my client she was paid a really nice amount for the firm what she had to go through in this case and it all happened because I took a case that I had no knowledge of I was a young lawyer and I just wasn't willing to give up I wanted to fight I wanted to do good for the client had some embarrassing moments in the case because I didn't know things but you know what it made me a better attorney at the end of the day and that created what my firm has become today with my partner Keith Davidson he's had some similar stories and he's gonna you're gonna hear some of his war stories but together with our combined experience of making fools of ourselves we have become better attorneys for our lawyers and I look fondly back on that case as a formative years and becoming who I would be as a litigating attorney. 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