Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

Lawyer Pens Incredible Brief About Punctuation, Chickens

Don't accuse this guy of rambling or you'll get a rambling brief in response.

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chicken and eggThere are few aspects of litigation more annoying than the hall monitor pettiness some people can’t help but throw in front of a judge. Most disagreements don’t require a docket entry when a simple phone call or pistols at dawn can clear up everything nicely. Likewise, not every quibble needs to be framed as some rule violation as if the judge is going to hand out smiley stickers. For example, if a complaint includes some chunky, rambling paragraphs, the lawyers can hash out what the allegations are getting at, and if they can’t reach an agreement, the answering attorney can just write that they cannot admit or deny anything in the paragraph and reserve the right to respond upon further clarification.

Or they can say this:

Sixteenth Defense: Answering Defendant alleges that the Plaintiffs Complaint, by containing run-on sentences, multiple allegations in the same paragraph, conclusions, verbose exaggerations, and “stream of consciousness” rhetoric, violates Rule 8 of the Ohio Rules of Civil Procedure and should, therefore, be stricken in its entirety.

Why’d you have to go and make it like that? Because now it’s been broughten.

Timothy Chappars, a solo practitioner in Ohio with decades of experience decided he wasn’t taking any guff off opposing counsel, Nicholas Subashi of Subashi Wildermuth. What followed was a single sentence filing… delivered over the course of three pages. Oh yeah, Chappars got his Molly Bloom on.

…I can’t believe that defense counsel in this case thinks he is really cool because he practically lives in the gym and he’s into rock-climbing and mountaineering like he’s the next Reinhold Messner making the first unaided ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen and gets to go on these adventure trips out west when I’m stuck in the office responding to a defendant’s third set of discovery requests and attending multi-hour depositions of witnesses when….

And it just keeps on going.

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I feel sorry for the Judge anyway because he is a Browns’ fan and suffers like everyone else who has the misfortune to follow that inept team for decades and decades and things never improve but speaking of losers did you see that Ohio State offense and no matter how bad things get it can’t be that bad but they were probably overrated anyway….

Probably? I’d say definitely.

But the coup de grace of this run-on sentence performance art response was attaching as an exhibit Doug Zongker’s classic scientific paper “Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken” which reads like Hodor got a Ph.D. in ornithology.

The whole filing is attached on the next page. Check it out for yourself. I, for one, am convinced that this guy knows what a real run-on sentence looks like.

We’re barely into the new year and we’ve already got a strong entry in the race for the best legal writing of the year. Congratulations America.

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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