Clients behaving badly: What’s a lawyer to do?
May 8, 2008
Is it a lawyer’s responsibility to clean up his or her client’s foul language?
One federal judge seems to think so.
Our sister publication reports that a Chicago attorney was hit with almost $30,000 in sanctions after his client used the f-word during a deposition. Used it 73 TIMES, to be precise.
To be fair, Dan Heilman at Minnesota Lawyer points out:
Wider’s loose-tongued ways might sound excessive until you learn that the 73 f-bombs were dropped over the course of 12 hours’ worth of depositions. What’s one effenheimer every 10 minutes? The film Scarface contained the big daddy of cuss words 226 times in only two hours and 50 minutes.
The sanctioned attorney, Joseph Ziccardi, apparently laughed off the profanity and refrained from telling his client to go easy on the four-letter words. Here’s a link to the opinion.
JACKIE SAUTER, Web Editor
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If you actually read the opinion, it’s not the use of the mere use of the “f” word that got the client in trouble, as this post seems to suggest. Nor is was it the failure of the lawyer to tell the client not to use the “f” word.
The opinion is 44 pages. There are fairly lengthy excerpts of the client’s deposition testimony in which the client is truly hostile and abusive toward the attorney questioning him. For instance, he tells counsel “Go f*** yourself, Bob.” And, when the attorney asks about something in a loan file, the client says to the attorney “Open it up and find out. I’m not your f*cking b*tch.” The client was also clearly evasive. According to the opinion, the sanctioned attorney did very little to convince his client to answer the questions posed.