TO-WIT: THE WRONG STUFF
If there’s anything I have learned in my thirty four years at the bar, it’s that the law is a jealous mistress. Yeah, I know, you’ve heard it before, but if your mistress has a hissy fit because you played golf instead of finishing your overdue brief, you’re lucky. Mine is armed with a knife and keeps staring south of my belt.
Recently she was listening in when I received a phone call from a pro bono client whom I had successfully represented before a local magistrate. Her landlord had filed suit, prose, to regain possession of her apartment because she had taken in a room mate in violation of the terms of the lease.
Now yes, my client had taken in a room mate, and, yes, it was her boy friend, but this was HUD assisted housing, she was disabled, and the lease did permit her to have live in help to aid her. I never quite got a handle on why this so disturbed the landlord, but the occupants were not married, it was a one bedroom unit, he was a Republican, you get the drift.
“You’ll win this case,” I told her before the hearing, and I was right. “The landlord won’t appeal,” I told her after the hearing, and I was wrong. Not only did he appeal, he hired a lawyer to do it. Zowie, you can’t get more wrong than that.
When the client received notice of the appeal, she called me. “The appeal was filed too late,” she said, “can you get it dismissed?”
I carefully explained that even though the appeal was filed thirty two days after the decision, it was timely because the thirtieth day fell on a Saturday, giving the landlord until the following Monday to file.
“Then why did the clerk at the magistrate’s office tell me the appeal period was only ten days,” she asked.
“Because she is a clerk in a magistrate’s office and not an attorney at law,” I fired back peevishly.
“Then how come the notice we got from the magistrate said they had ten days to appeal?”
I smelled trouble. “Oh, excuse me,” I said to my client, “the governor is calling on the other line, I’ll call you right back.”
A quick consultation with my partner led me to conclude that the client was right. Apparently the Landlord Tenant Act had been callously and, as far as I was concerned, secretly amended some ten years earlier to provide a ten day appeal period for matters that only involved possession. The appeal was indeed untimely, my client had won, and I was just fit to be tied.
“How could I not know this,” I asked my partner.
“Maybe it’s because you haven’t read the advance sheets in ten years” she answered back, and I made a mental note to review her salary package.
I think I handled it pretty well though. I called the client back, I told her that of course the appeal period was ten days, everyone knew that, and I assured her I could get the appeal dismissed. As we hung up, I swear I could hear the sound of a spinning grindstone.
When opposing counsel agreed to withdraw the appeal, that should have been that. It wasn’t. My mistress knows I botched this one, she knows I didn’t know the law, and she’s not going to let me forget it, not now, not ever.
You see, this was landlord-tenant law, the prototypical battleground of the rich against the poor, the powerful against the puny, the haughty against the righteous. I went to law school so I could do those cases, so I could represent the oppressed, the weak, the underprivileged. Zeal oozed from me then like poopoo from a baby’s bottom, and I had all the right stuff to use it - a clever mind, a bleeding heart and an irate soul that yearned to strike back at the arrogance of power. I was angry all the time and it was glorious.
I’m a better lawyer now, certainly more adept at lawyering. But my time is gobbled up with business matters, real estate and golf. I go to Florida more often than I go to court. I’m not doing the kinds of cases and causes that once defined me. It’s both sad and ironic that the accumulation of success, wisdom and experience seems to suffocate the very fires for which they were acquired.
That’s what my lady is mad about, and that’s why she has once again started shopping for cutlery.
So I’m going to call our local Pro Bono Coordinator and take more of these cases. There are still lots of folk out there who need me, almost as much as I need them.
I have no delusions here. This kind of work is hard, frustrating and thankless, and I’m not as patient or as tolerant as I used to be. So, if from time to time I throw my hands up in despair, if from time to time I lose my patience, if from time to time the exigencies of such matters occasionally conflict with my golf game, well, that’s okay. That’s what God invented young partners for.
©2004, S. Sponte, Esq.