Renegade lawyers tripped up by Chrysler.

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Renegade Lawyers Tripped Up by Chrysler

Lie to the court about activities and documents, and lawyers are going to get whacked. So says the Eighth Circuit in Chrysler Corp. v. Carey, 186 F.3d 1016 (1999), which affirmed striking pleadings and submitting the case to the jury as a sanction under Rule 37 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

When they were associates at the St. Louis firm of Thompson & Mitchell, John J. Carey and Joseph P. Danis did a lot of work for Chrysler on product liability cases, about a quarter of their billings in 1993 and 1994. In 1995, they formed their own firm and took about a thousand documents pertaining to Chrysler on which they hadn't worked. They then got together with an informal group of class action lawyers that was mounting cases against Chrysler.

When Chrysler sued them for breach of fiduciary duty, intense discovery and a four-day trial ensued. On the ground that the defendants had engaged in a systematic pattern of abuse and "blatant disregard of the court's orders and discovery rules" by failing to produce documents in response to discovery requests, the district court found that the discovery responses, which denied the existence of communications and documents, were clearly false. As a sanction, the district court struck the defendants' pleadings.

Affirming, the Eighth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Beam, held that the necessary foundation for sanctions under Rule 37 had been found and that the sanction was appropriate, dismissing the defendants' argument that monetary sanctions would have been sufficient.

Federal Prosecutors Bound by Local Ethics Rules

Colorado's Rule of Professional Conduct limiting the use of subpoenas against attorneys to compel evidence about a past or present client in criminal proceedings, as adopted by the U.S. District Court for that state, may be enforced against federal prosecutors in the investigation and prosecution of federal crimes, the 10th Circuit held in United States v. Colorado Supreme Court, 186 F.3d 1281 (1999).

Colorado Rule 3.8(f) provides that a prosecutor shall not subpoena a lawyer in a criminal proceeding to present evidence about a past or present client unless the prosecutor reasonably believes that information sought is not protected by any applicable privilege, the evidence sought is essential to the successful completion of an ongoing investigation or prosecution and there is no other feasible alternative to obtain the information.

For several...