Magistrate Evokes Maytag Repairman, Schoolmarm in Opinion Blasting Lawyers
A federal magistrate says she’s not the Maytag repairman or an elementary school teacher, but suggests that two lawyers in a civil rights lawsuit are apparently oblivious to that fact.
In a scathing opinion (PDF), Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen admonishes Las Vegas plaintiffs lawyer Robert Kossack and his opposing counsel, Walter Cannon, for making suggestive objections in depositions that amounted to coaching of their witnesses, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.
Leen said both lawyers violated the federal civil procedure rules by their lengthy deposition objections in the suit against police and the state governor by a former cocktail waitress. Leen confessed to feeling “like a schoolmarm scolding little boys” in admonishing Kossack and Cannon, who are “better men and better lawyers than the conduct in which you have engaged illustrates.”
“If I was an elementary school teacher instead of a judge,” she said, counsel would be required to write “on a blackboard 500 times” that they will follow clearly established legal rules. Among them: “I will not make speaking, coaching, suggestive objections which violate Rule 30. I am an experienced lawyer and know that objections must be concise, non-argumentative and non-suggestive.”
The dispute had reached Leen in the form of an emergency motion filed by Kossack, who represents plaintiff Chrissy Mazzeo, seeking an order barring Cannon from making argumentative and suggestive objections during a deposition, and seeking sanctions for a previous pattern of doing so. Cannon’s response argued that his actions paled in comparison to Kossack’s deposition objections. Kossack then countered by comparing the number of his alleged improper objections with those by Cannon. He also threw in some “gratuitous comments” about “counsels’ respective choice of beverages during depositions,” Leen wrote.
Leen said discovery disputes in the case have taken an inordinate amount of her time, so she didn’t act immediately on the so-called emergency motion. “I am not the Maytag repairman of federal judges desperately hoping for something to do,” she said.
