Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Wednesday, August 30, 2006 11:09:30 PM
I am normally going to be very critical of the state supreme court, but not tonight, at least for a few minutes.
Several years ago, a litigant hired an attorney to defend him against a charge that isn't important to this discussion. What is important is that litigants do not receive information on court filings or rulings, except through their attorney. This particular attorney was preoccupied, and failed to forward the documents to his clients, or take any action to protect his clients. This went on for a long enough period of time that the Defendant was slapped with a default judgment for more than $200,000.
When the Defendant finally became aware that the Plaintiff had secured a default judgment, he attempted to get the judgment reversed. The case eventually made its way to the Colorado Supreme Court, which had to decide if, and under what conditions a default judgment could be reversed when obvious attorney misconduct had occurred.
To its credit, it did reverse the judgment and ordered the matter to trial. In that way, it protected the public. However, it didn't think through the implications of the case law it had created. What it really created was a road map for a Low Risk Attorney Scam, which is definintely not protecting the public.
Any attorney who has the courage to risk the likely penalties for following this road map might stall the lawsuit a year before a judge who was paying attention, and two years before one that wasn't.
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In Part 3, we will look at the Attorney Regulation case law to determine what the likely penalty might be, and whether that penalty is sufficiently severe to discourage this strategy. (Hint, you will die laughing)
For those attorneys who may wish to employ this strategy, I believe the case law is Craig v. Rider. I need to do some research to confirm that information.