Death By Lawyers
Delay, by shunning opportunities to avoid lawsuits in the first place.
Delay, by instructing lawyers to frustrate the scheduling of even the most basic pre-trial tasks.
And most cowardly of all, procedural delay: throwing obstructions in the plaintiff’s path, and transforming the truism “justice delayed is justice denied” into a game plan.
We’ve coined a jocular tag for the practice: Death By Lawyers.
If you’re unlucky enough to become the victim of defamation by an editorially dishonest media conglomerate, you’ll learn all about Death By Lawyers.
The goal of these procedural delays is to discourage plaintiffs, to instil fear that an ordinary individual will never secure his or her day in court against the enormous resources of the corporation, backed by its insurance company or companies.
It’s a formula intended to kill lawsuits, whether the actions have merit or not.
Overcoming Death By Lawyers is expensive and time consuming in its own right.
But if you’ve been left no choice but to sue, and if you have the resources and time to pursue the corporate defendants, then your lawyers can turn the tables on the culprits, and in a big way.
That’s because intentional delay comes with a price to the guilty party.
Provided you can prove to the jury at trial that the offending party has aggravated the original damages you’ve suffered, the scope for relief from those damages increases greatly.
Keep an eye here for past and future examples of Death By Lawyers.
You be the judge. See if you agree that there’s really only one appropriate response to the phenomenon, namely:
“Go ahead, make my day.”