In my latest book “Minority Viewpoint – my experience, as a person of color, with the American Justice System” I talk about my utmost surprise at the way my lawyer and his firm viewed the summary judgment loss. They did not want to take any responsibility at all – instead they believed that the judges (i.e., the trial judge and the 3 appeal judges) were all wrong. Here is an excerpt from my book:
“I find this very interesting. This is like a football game when a referee makes a call – the coach does not like the call and challenges the call (which is like an appeal) – the referee then reviews the replay in association with other senior officials and comes back to confirm the call – but the coach and the players continue to blame the officials for losing the game for them!
They really need to move on from blaming the officials and start looking at themselves to take some responsibility for the loss and figure out what they did wrong and what they could have done better to win the game. It was clear that neither my lawyer nor his firm was going to take ANY responsibility for the loss. My lawyer was not only a part of my team, he was the leader, but yet, he was not going to take any responsibility for losing my case.
We thought that the managing partner of the law firm will take some responsibility for not being able to help me in this lawsuit. We were not expecting that he would say that “we screwed up badly”. But we were expecting that he would say something like, “I am really sorry that we were not successful in this lawsuit. We really felt that we had a reasonable shot, but in the legal world, pieces don’t always fall the right way. Maybe there are some things that could have been done differently, but I can assure you that we did our best in trying to win this for you. Sometimes there are judgment calls involved and it’s not always easy to predict how the calls will work out”.
Some comments like that would have given us the feeling that at least they were taking a measure of responsibility. Instead what we got was an extremely strong defensive stand and that was disheartening”.