At work, I have been involved in 4 cases of age or sex discrimination, labor grievances, etc.. In 3 out of the 4 cases, the attorneys were incompetent and did not even talk to me prior to the court proceedings! The attorneys were from major law firms but were relatively new. They talked to the personnel department which knows nothing about what actually happened. We won every case but no thanks to the attorneys in 3 of the cases. Each time walking in, the three said we were going to lose. I said no way because we had not done anything wrong and i had proof. This surprised them - they just assumed we were doing things wrong. At the first trial, i had to borrow paper so i could slip to the lawyer each question he should ask. After that, I brought my own pad and slipped them the questions. In one case, i drove both attorneys back to their cars because of a storm. They both said they had expected me to lose. The opposing attorney said after a while, he cringed every time he saw me hand my attorney a question. When testifying, I always left a little something unsaid. He would pounce on that and ask another question that buried him deeper. He said it finally got to the point where he was telling himself to just sit down but each time he just could not pass up the chance to nail us with a possible flaw in our case. He said his clients were idiots because if they had given him all of the information, then he could have told them they were wrong and were wasting their time and money. The 4th attorney was fresh out of school but was a joy to work with. He met with us ahead of time and did his homework and we were in and out very quickly.
In these cases, I did make comments directly to the judge when testifying and even asked questions of him. In one case, the judge actually said for me to ask the questions instead of passing them to the attorney because it would go quicker. My attorney objected but the judge told him to sit down because he was obviously not contributing to the case. It was kind of neat. I even finally got to tell the judge that based on the testimony from the plaintiffs themselves, there was no case and we were wasting time. He agreed and dismissed the case right then. But these are labor, etc. cases which are different than criminal and even regular civil cases.
Ken
