Alvin the dead cat is among many travails that led to blown deadline, lawyer says in court filing
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A Washington, D.C., solo has an explanation for missing a deadline in a federal court case. It involves gout, pneumonia, pain killers, “certain home remedies that in retrospect were ill-advised,” a dead cat and an unhappy friend.
James Fournier’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month are detailed in a Feb. 10 federal court filing published on Above the Law.
Fournier’s problems began, he says in the court document, when he contracted gout and pneumonia in January, finding himself “essentially bedridden” with severe pain and coughing. After a trip to the emergency room, he sought a three-day extension in a “wildly optimistic” belief his health would soon improve.
It did not. Fournier’s medications included the painkillers Percodan and Percocet, and the steroid indomethacin. The painkillers made it too difficult to work, so Fournier increased the indomethacin. Unfortunately it caused “severe gastrointestinal disturbance.”
Fournier was nonetheless making headway. “And then a series of bizarre events occurred that, combined with counsel’s illness, made it impossible to work steadily in any meaningful manner,” he writes. Though he obtained three extensions, they were not enough.
The next section of the court filing is titled “Alvin the Cat.”
Fournier’s confidence about making the latest deadline had improved, until his children arrived home from school on Friday, Jan. 30. “One of them commented that they had not seen Alvin, the family’s longtime house cat, for about a week,” Fournier writes.
“There were also three other children in the house–a housemate’s two children (more on him below) and a neighbor’s child. A grand, somewhat wild search of the house with six children ensued, and two hours later, Alvin was found dead in a closet. After considerable effort, involving two shovels and rubber gloves, plaintiff’s counsel placed Alvin in a box and told the kids that we would bury him tomorrow. Counsel, hobbling around, is now exhausted. By late Friday evening, it became clear to counsel that the opposition papers were not going to be completed.”
At this point, Fournier says, he had already obtained three extensions of time from “genuinely gracious” defense counsel, who had warned he would not grant any more. “Accordingly, counsel did not think requesting another enlargement of time on Friday evening or early Saturday morning stemming from illness exhaustion, compounded by a dead house cat, would gain much traction,” Fournier says.
As promised, Fournier held the cat’s funeral the next day. “There were then discussions about the nature of life and death, where would Alvin go after he died, et cetera, which took some time,” Fournier wrote. “Late that evening, counsel dug Alvin back up and disposed of him out of the backyard. In doing so, counsel hit his foot on the shovel the wrong way, thereby triggering another gout attack.”
Fournier was back at work on Monday, Feb. 2, “although much of the momentum had been broken, and frankly, the opposing papers did not look as good as they did while on pain killers.”
The next roadblock, however, was Fournier’s housemate, a close friend taken in while he was going through a divorce. “For reasons wholly unclear, that morning he was in need of counseling concerning the state of his marriage, to the point where I was concerned for his immediate well-being. I think Alvin’s funeral and ceremony with the kids triggered something. In any event, we spoke for several hours, following which plaintiff’s counsel was exhausted and his foot on fire.”
He missed the Feb. 3 deadline, as well as a Feb. 6 deadline to respond to an order to show cause, this time due to problems with his scanner.
The opposing counsel was unmoved by Fournier’s explanation. “Plaintiff counsel seeks special rules for a solo practitioner, as if proceeding pro se,” wrote Fairfax, Virginia, lawyer John McGavin in his reply (PDF). “No such rules exist. Plaintiff counsel should not take cases that he cannot adequately handle as a solo practitioner or to obtain special treatment as a result.”
Fournier told the ABA Journal in an email that he felt he needed to offer the detailed explanation. “I’d like to forget that I ever had to write that brief, but given the situation, I decided that total honesty sparing no embarrassment was the only way to make the court understand that this did not fall into any of the typical reasons why deadlines get missed,” Fournier said.
Updated at 8:20 a.m. to include Fournier’s comment to the ABA Journal.
