TO-WIT: LOL
It wasn’t one of my shining moments. Twenty years have passed, the client in question has long since gone on to a final reward hopefully far richer than the measly temporal one I was able to achieve for him, and yet every time it pops into memory I still convulse with tasteless laughter like the craven, heartless bastard I sometimes seem to be.
It was a dog bite case, and a good one at that. The sui canine was my favorite breed, a German Second Biter. Good doggie! And the client was a kind and elderly gent who had stopped by to visit an ailing friend, lugging with him carpet samples he had picked up at the store to help his friend make a decision about some new carpeting.
As soon as the front door opened, this delightfully vicious beast knocked him to the ground and began savagely biting him about the head, face, arms, shoulders and legs. And now six months later here he was, in the middle of his deposition, testifying about the gruesome attack that had sent him to the hospital for two weeks. He gets to the part about his rolling around in the dirt with the dog on top of him and I start to chuckle.
Oh, had it only stayed a chuckle. But as I listened to his testimony, as I conjured up the image of this roly-poly little old man beset by dog and dust and entwined in a bizarre mélange of yelping and barking and the wild, ineffectual flailing of chubby arms and chubby legs, plaid socks sunk below pasty white ankles, shags and Berbers flung asunder, the chuckle became a laugh, then a guffaw, then a howling, relentless torrent of cackles, chortles, snorts, hoots and snickers.
I tried to stop it, I really did. I twisted my fingers, bit my lips and stabbed my palms with a ball point pen, all to no avail. Once that raging flow of mirth got loose nothing could staunch it, and when opposing counsel mercifully suggested this might be a good time to let the court reporter take a break, I could only nod in affirmation as I fumbled for my handkerchief to dry the blood from my lips, the ink from my hands and the tears from my eyes.
Now I know what you’re thinking. What kind of lawyer laughs at the searing, painful lances with which life impales his clients? Oh, I do, I do. The finger in eye, hammer blow to head humor of the Three Stooges has always brought tears to my eyes. So have the blunt force stylings of all the great comedy duos, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Adam and Eve. Damn funny stuff.
It is an unerring truth of the human condition that tears of laughter and tears of sorrow flow from the same wellspring, and isn’t drafting long and hard from that spring what it is we all do for a living?. As long as this madding profession drives me to tears, I’m going to laugh about it. Crying is really more for the uninitiated, don’t you think?
There’s a pragmatic side to this as well, as laughing is not without its profit. After the deposition had concluded, my client decided to settle for the reasonable offer the insurance company had already put on the table.
“The only flaw in my case was you,” he told me. “You’re crazy, and I’d be crazy too if I let you take my case to a jury.”
Ah yes, crazy, maybe so. But I’ve been practicing law now for more than forty years, and in those quiet, contemplative moments, when I’m off visiting the deep recesses of my psyche, that statistic has me positively rolling in the aisles.
© 2011, S. Sponte, Esq.