"From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization."
I started the day not sure what I'd write about, living into one of those dark, black dog days that arrive without fanfare or any identifiable reason. It began to manifest yesterday while I was playing a reasonably solid nine holes of golf on the prettiest fall day I've ever seen. By this morning it was enveloping. So I figured I'd make this morning's post sort of newsy, describing the long weekend that included this not-terribly-successful project filling in the low places in the backyard where P pulled up some pavers she disfavored.
The view from the office balcony is enough to give you vertigo, eh?
Then I opened my email and realized I had a lot of work to do. In a little over an hour I depose the corporate representative of a window manufacturer in a case going to trial in a couple weeks. It should have been an anodyne affair, just laying a foundation for the introduction of some inspection and repair records.
But last night around bedtime, an email arrived with a link to over 200 pages of documents they'd failed to send in response to my subpoena three months ago. And hidden in the pile were never before seen emails and images showing that the other side's expert, a vendor of theirs, had lied in his deposition about the work he'd done on the property, and the issues he'd identified. So in an apparent effort to help the guy, they waited until the night before the deposition, on a holiday weekend, to release the documents that showed his earlier testimony was misleading, perhaps deliberately. Did the other side know this? I hope not.
My profession provides a front-row seat to the spectacle of human folly, more so even than being a doctor or a clergyman. Schopenhauer once trenchantly observed, "The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity." So true.
Speaking of which, Peg and I watched Dark Waters this past weekend, a rather unsettling film telling the true story of DuPont's poisoning of a community in the process of manufacturing teflon. The protagonist is a lawyer who, through a family friend, gets dragged into a seemingly bottomless case against a corporate behemoth that manipulates both his law partners and the litigation game in an effort to obfuscate and hide what it's known for years: that it was killing every living thing downstream and downwind from its factory. One of the dirty lawyer tricks the movie documents was the common tactic of responding to a precise discovery request with a warehouse full of banker's boxes crammed with documents, and the message that "the evidence you requested is in there . . . somewhere."
Which is sort of like dropping a couple hundred pages of undisclosed documents in my in-basket after hours the night before a deposition.
So I need to sign off and start assembling a folder, and rewriting my outline.
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