Nicholas went back to the dingy little office and slumped in his chair and kicked off his Ferragamo loafers. What had he gotten himself into? He just thought he would do a favor for his new office buddy, and make a quick buck while he was at it. He even agreed not to take any fees, beside the small retainer, until the divorce was finalized since Frank had no money. He didn't even ask for interrogatories. He thought Fargo would jump at the opportunity to end this quick like he wanted to do. Interrogatories are like an inventory of assets. What is your salary, what do you own, what's everything worth. It makes it easier to divide everything equally. We weren't even going there. Just you keep what you have, we'll keep what we have and call it a day, or a marriage if you will. Now, Nicholas had to write up a brief to enforce the settlement, wait for her to answer it and find out what the legal reason was for walking out of the property settlement without signing over the old house to Frank. Then go to court and see what the judge says. This is all going to take many hours of legal time that Frank could not afford to pay. It wasn't like there was alot of work coming in though. Nicholas had only just set up his office, but so far only a few strays came. One inquiring if he could sue his landlord for kicking him out of his apartment. Another wanting to sue McDonald's because she always had varying amounts of Chicken McNuggets every time she went there. She actually kept a log of who waited on her and how many nuggets she got. Another guy wanted to sue his roommate because he was speaking to him telepathically and he asked him to stop but he wouldn't. He was actually tempted to take the next crazy lawsuit that came in just to pay some bills. The next time he decided he would ask for a two-thousand dollar retainer and see what happened.
Also, Frank was not your average client. Obviously something was going on mentally. Frank was difficult to communicate with and Nicholas was not sure that Frank always understood what he was telling him. For example, when Mulva and Kat left the room without signing all the papers, Frank knew something happened but Nicholas had to explain it to him three times before he seemed to get it. The stress of divorcing a woman with anger issues just may be getting to him. Now Nicholas had to be a doctor and diagnose his medical problems too?
Nicholas had recently been to a Continuing Legal Education seminar on "Handling Toxic People in the Workplace". A requirement of keeping one's law degree is to enroll in continuing education classes. Kat's personality fit to a tee the Passive Aggressive and Covert Anger personality described in the seminar, which actually had him quite worried. They described this type of client as a high-conflict individual who poses the greatest risk to professionals in initiating complaints and baseless litigations and engaging in protracted divorce settlements. He felt that one of his responsibilities as counsel was to bring his clients into reality. Most of the time there is no happy ending or justice for wrongs, just finality and hopefully peace at the end. Sometimes people come in with angry stories of injustices along with demands for retribution and the attorney has to be the one to bring them down and face the fact that sometimes things happen and there's nothing that can be done; there is no case. Hopefully Mulva Fargo is as anxious to end this as he is, but he had the feeling that she would prolong this as long as possible because a Passive-Aggressive client with money is money in the bank.
No comments:
Post a Comment