Lawyers Are Revealing The Most Shocking Case They've Worked On, And My Jaw Is On The Floor
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Warning: This post contains mentions of violence, drugs, and sexual abuse.
A while back, redditor u/brainstew__ asked the lawyers of Reddit, "What is the most shocking case you have worked on?" They revealed the wildest cases they've dealt with, and some of them will leave you speechless. Here are the surprising results:
1."I used to work as a legal secretary for a personal injury lawyer. He told me about a case where his client had radiation burns from an X-ray machine. In the avalanche of documents he received from the defendant during discovery, he found an internal memo. The memo described a serious problem with the machines and continued: 'This is an issue we can't ignore... unfortunately, it's not in the budget.'"
"When the case went to trial, he told the jury, 'Show them they need to put this in the budget next time.' The jury complied, handing down one of the largest verdicts California had ever seen."
2."I was pretty new to the practice and was meeting with a lot of clients. The firm I worked for had a lot of walk-ins, and I was processing the potential clients. I called in the next person, and a mid-30s woman walked in carrying a red and white cooler. She pops it down on my desk and then spends about five minutes trying to sit down in the chair. My first thought was, 'Must be some kind of personal injury.' The first words out of her mouth, after she sits, were, 'I need to sue my doctor because my vagina just fell out.' My eyes immediately lock on to the cooler. 'Is...that?' I asked."
"'Yes,' she said. 'I brought it in with me just in case you needed to see it. Do you want to see it?' She begins to open the cooler. Not gonna lie. I was curious, but I stopped her and convinced her that a hospital was her best option at the moment. Turns out, she had vaginal reconstruction, and the mesh came out in one big blob. Now, this is not my area of expertise. I am a corporate attorney. So, I sent her to someone with more experience."
3."Slayer statute, interpleader case in federal court. The client murdered her husband to collect insurance proceeds. Found out that she promised to pay two dudes to bind his hands and feet with duct tape, execute him, and burn him in an alley for $20K each, to be paid out of the insurance funds. She lost."
4."It was a family law matter. I was a newly-minted attorney who couldn’t find work in the early 2010s and took anything that came to me. It was a custody battle. I represented the mom. The dad lived with his father (grandfather) who had been convicted TWICE of raping other grandchildren. Easy case, right? No. Because Mom absolutely forbade me from bringing the grandfather’s convictions before the judge. Said he made 'some mistakes,' and while she wanted full custody, of course, she felt bad that grandfather’s 'past mistakes' might be used against him in the future, forever. I brought it up to the judge anyway. She fired me on the spot, during oral arguments. She ended up suing me. It was a mess. Would do it again."
5."A mother sold the family farm out from under the son who was supposed to inherit it. Someone shot her (non-fatally). There were so many suspects that almost every lawyer in the county was assigned to defend one of them. Forensics eventually narrowed it down to two suspects, but each so adamantly pointed at the other as the shooter that it was going to be hard to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt of either one's guilt. They both pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served two years."
6."I'm an immigration lawyer. I do mostly VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) and asylum, but I handle other stuff on occasion. I had a prospective client come in a few weeks ago. He's interested in pursuing a relatively straightforward application. He tells me that he might have a criminal history that could affect his immigration. It's only one arrest, though, he says. It happened in 19XX. And it's not serious. 'OK,' I say. It happens. Nobody's perfect, and a single arrest is generally not a dealbreaker. So, as I'm talking with him, I decide to Google his pretty unique name. A news article comes up, from his country, in his language. It's dated the same year he said...19XX. Hm. I ask him, 'What kind of crime did you say it was?' 'Oh,' he says, 'I think it was drug-related.' I figure, alright, marijuana arrest or something; nothing we can't overcome. I click through to the article..."
"The photo in the article sure looks a lot like the prospective client. Turns out, the prospective client's arrest was not for marijuana at all. It was for cocaine. And not a little cocaine. This guy was caught attempting to smuggle XX pallets of cocaine. I must have looked a little bug-eyed because the guy gave me a sort of sheepish look and a shrug. I tell the prospective client, maybe we should start by filing a few FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests to see what comes up, and we'll go from there. He agrees, and that's that. I'll double-check my suspicions against the government record, and let the client know what can or cannot be done. Suffice it to say, getting caught smuggling multiple pallets of cocaine is not a small-time arrest. But, you never know what is or isn't true, and you should always do your due diligence."
7."I'm an attorney, but the case that stuck with me most was one I sat in on during undergrad. I was a criminal justice major and frequently had to go watch trials for class assignments. I was in the military at the time, so I had to cram these hours in randomly — if we had a light day, or I could take a long lunch, I would go to the closest courthouse and check what was available. One day, I went down to the federal courthouse in Baltimore and checked the list: one criminal case, nothing else going. I head upstairs and quietly walk in. Despite that, clearly, everyone checks me out, which is odd — usually, no one pays attention to the gallery. At the first break, a guy comes over and asks me who I am and why I’m there; he's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) with the Air Force, so I show him my ID and explain I have to watch criminal trials. He gives me a weird look but doesn’t push. As I’m sitting there, I slowly realize I SHOULD NOT BE HERE."
"An Air Force couple has a son, and gets divorced. She takes her son with her to her duty station in Japan and remarries a civilian employee there. Dad is deployed, then moves station, and keeps bugging her about when he can see the son; at some point, she just stops responding. A few months later, after Dad has filed a report with her command, requesting they make her communicate with him, Dad gets a call from an OSI agent who he knows, asking him for his son's full name and date of birth. Dad gives it to him, and the agent says, 'Look. I didn’t tell you this, but you need to call OSI on her base.' Mom had gone to the field, and her 8-year-old son had been bugging the stepdad while he was gaming. Stepdad got pissed off and beat the kid with the first thing to hand — a piece of banister from the stair he was working in. Mom came back from the field two days later and found the son unconscious, still on the floor. Because the stepdad's last home of record was in Maryland, he was tried in federal court in Baltimore. I sat through the ER doc who treated the son, who talked about seeing the internal crush injuries, and the coroner who talked about how hard you would have to hit an 8-year-old on the front to cause bruising on his back. I also sat through the dad talking about finding out his son was gone. After that day, I always went to misdemeanor court for my hours."
8."I did an alleged arson case for an insurance company once. The insured had to provide a list of all items he had lost including over 1,000 book titles. Every book was the biography of a serial killer — we figured it was probably every book ever written about a serial killer. Insured gave off serious dark and mysterious vibes. Who knows the truth?"
9."It was a labor case, in which in the middle of the hearing, the judge (60-year-old male) started to flirt with my client (23-year-old female) in a direct, straightforward way. It was SO shocking that was one of the only cases I got speechless in a trial. Those hearings are closed here in Brazil, so no jury, no recording — nothing."
10."During law school, I clerked with the public defender's office. I was working on a homicide case where our client murdered his wife in front of his child. Then, he got in his car, recorded all his calls, and called all of his family and friends to tell them that he just killed his wife. He had no remorse and told everyone how happy he was that she was dead."
"This experience along with defending child rapists made me realize that I didn't want to do criminal defense work. However, I do really respect those attorneys. They have incredibly difficult jobs that are necessary for our justice system to function, but most people hate them for it."
11."I didn't work on it, but I was in the courtroom at the time with other cases. I was working with the DA during my first year in law school, being presided by the biggest prick judge I've ever encountered in my life. This couple broke up, and the woman got a restraining order on this guy. A month or two later, this guy goes out with his friends to some bar. Later in the night, the ex-girlfriend shows up at the same bar. The guy goes up to her and says, 'I know you have a restraining order against me, are you comfortable with me here, or should I leave? I won't bother you either way.' She says she doesn't want him around, so he leaves right away. Dude got put away three years for that."
"You aren't supposed to be within 100 feet or have any contact with the person who filed. So, the fact this guy said that one sentence to her got him put away for three years. Even though he was there first and trying to be courteous by asking and then leaving right away. This was the very beginning of my law career and already not a good sign LOL. I hate being a lawyer so much."
12."I normally defend construction defect and personal injury matters, nothing too wild. Early in my career, we got a case involving a husband and wife who ran a foster home, and one kid was alleging the husband had molested them. I was assigned to defend only the wife under their homeowners insurance policy. The allegations against the husband were bad, but the wife had no idea what was going on. Here was this poor woman, who was also a former foster child, trying to give back and help other foster children in the system, and now, she finds out her husband is a child molester. It was heartbreaking, and we just wanted to get her out of the case. Then, we get more documents and learn that this isn't the first child to make allegations. The dad had been doing this for years, and she knew it."
"Maybe she was involved, maybe she just ignored it — either way, the whole thing turned absolutely gross. I instantly wanted nothing to do with it. A few weeks later, my boss (the coolest guy ever) comes in and says he gave the case back to the insurance carrier, thank god. That was the only case I've ever felt morally opposed to handling."
13."I was dating a nice woman back in 2016. In our first conversation, I asked her what she did for a living. She was a paralegal for a malpractice firm at the time. I asked her if there were any interesting cases happening. She said, 'Yes, one we are going to lose.' I was interested... I asked what happened. She told me, 'Well, we are defending a doctor who made a mistake. One of his patients was suffering from an eye condition that required a unique recovery. After surgery, the patient had to lie face down for the entirety of their day to prevent further eye damage. It had something to do with eye pressure and a gas buildup near the back of the eye. As it turns out, the patient wanted to fly on a plane and would intend to keep their eyes down through the whole flight. The doctor we're defending didn't tell the patient that they couldn't fly during the recovery.' The next part definitely sucked..."
"When the patient took off on the plane, everything was OK. During descent, which people with ear problems can attest, the rapid change in pressure messed up this patient's condition. They went completely blind in both eyes due to the descent of the plane. Predictably, the doctor did lose the case. It was definitely an interesting first conversation to have with someone."
14."I'm not a lawyer, but I work closely with a lot of lawyers and see the same stuff they do. There was a case where a woman had been a victim of human trafficking and was kidnapped in her home country and sold into a prostitution ring in the US. She escaped, applied for asylum, told the FBI and whatnot everything she knew about her kidnappers and the others who bought her (putting her life in major danger), and she was told that's all it would take to get her asylum and permanent residency taken care of. They still tried to deport her."
"Don't worry. She won her case, but only because one of the top attorneys in New York (if you know of a lot of attorneys in NYC, you've probably heard about this one) took the case on pro bono. It was wild to me how hard ICE fought to get her sent back and how intense that case got."
—Anonymous
And finally...
15."One of my close friends is an environmental lawyer, primarily defending individual landowners in corporate cases where discharge or pollution has occurred, or where water rights are in contention. A couple of years back, there was a case where a well-known manufacturer of latex paints was found to be poisoning a local wetland (a big deal in my state) with runoff, and the state authority in charge of wetlands preservation took them to court. In a grandstanding effort to demonstrate to the judge that the chemical being discharged near the water could not possibly be toxic to the wildlife, a rep for the company brought a powdered form of the chemical in and mixed it with a glass of water there and then, intending to drink it dramatically in front of the court. The glass (actually plastic, but still) melted right there on the table."
"The case was settled out of court the same day."
Fellow lawyers, what's the most shocking case you've worked on? Let us know in the comments below.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
