Lawyers Behaving Nicely? HOW COULD YOU?!?

[captainsblog]

Many stories, photos and feels from events over the past two days out in the Buffalo world, which I'll get to in time, but I'll end this weekend with three tales from the workweek, of situations I became aware of where a lawyer actually did some good with no expectation of a "win" or a "payment."  In two of them, that lawyer was me.

The first, I mentioned here not quite a month ago. A recent client's bankruptcy filing revealed an antiquated practice in the local court's docketing of cases: the listing of all prior filings by that person, linked by the filer's full Social Security number. While that nine-digit SSN does not appear on the public filing, the case I filed for him listed cases he'd filed in another state well over a decade ago, listing the date, bankruptcy district, case number and full name from that filing.

Sometime in the past decade, a she became a he, and now, when I filed this case, anybody looking up his filing would see that was the case. I reported this to him before filing, and he was fine with it. There's no reason for it to have any legal relevance to the case itself, but with all the other shit going on in the world, I got to wondering why there's even a need to put this information on a court docket. It's not just this particular issue, known among those who experience it as "deadnaming;" a spouse or significant other might have left an abuser or stalker in their lives, changed their name, and given that guy (face it, it's probably a guy) a confirmation of their new name and address matching the one he knew them under. Again, what good is accomplished by risking what this information might mean to the person filing the case, which could be as much emotional as financial?

I took several steps to identify this as an issue for him (wasn't a problem) but also to prevent similar things from happening in the future. My own clients will now be warned of the possibility of a past name being disclosed when we first meet:

IMPORTANT: These cases within the past eight years, filed anywhere under any name using your SSN, may affect your eligibility. ALSO, ANY filing at any time, anywhere under any name using your SSN, will put a “PRIOR” flag on your docket and an entry may appear on it listing the date, case number and name under which you filed that case, if it was 10 or even 40 years ago. Please check here if such a disclosure would provide any issue for you. No Yes

I am also committing to doing a routine check on all clients' SSNs to see what might turn up; takes two minutes and costs me maybe a quarter. It's a best practice anyway, because not everybody discloses prior filings that might be relevant to the current case.  Unfortunately, not all local attorneys, and many self-filing individuals who, duh, can't afford a lawyer, might not take those steps, so I notified the clerk of the court of it as a general issue.  I did not receive a response for weeks, and frankly by last week didn't expect one, given the bureaucracy involved. So imagine my surprise when The Clerk Herself, boss of everyone but her three bosses Da Judges, called me back personally to tell me that, from now on, docketings will only list prior filings by date, district and case number. The nosy Grady and Gladys Kravetzes of the world can still go snooping using those data pieces and find a debtor's past married or deadname if they want to spend the time and money to do so, but it will no longer be an obvious thing. At least once in the unrelated routine administration of this client's case via emails, a trustee mispronouned my client, and I believe that's from him seeing it on the docket from years ago.

Maybe I didn't solve a problem. Maybe I did for people I will never meet or even hear of. I'm still glad I made the effort to do it.

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Not that I spend all of my time in random acts of charity. Far from it. I spend at least some of my working day actually trying to accomplish positive results for clients, making money for us in the process if I can do so. One of the tougher nuts in that department has been a case going on for well over three years.

A client obtained a judgment against a local individual in another state, and my job was to “domesticate” it into an enforceable instrument here in New York. We began the case right at the dawn of COVID, taking months to get even an initial court date scheduled. The dude then managed to stall for well over a year until finally, on April Fools Day of 2022, I got an even bigger domesticated judgment against him entered in Erie County. I’d had some previous encounters with the guy years ago when he was a creditor of a long-gone client of mine, and he’s been involved in some business bankruptcy proceedings, one of which is being administered by a friend of mine who was appointed as its bankruptcy trustee.

After almost a year and a half of further shenanigans, we finally reached a point where I am just about able to order the sale of his nearly half a million dollar mansion in a swanky section of Amherst. This development has finally brought him seriously to the negotiating table, and he and my client agreed on a figure, more than the original judgment but a little less than the later one entered here. It would be decent compensation for me even at the negotiated sum. To accomplish it, he told me he is putting a mortgage on that property out of which I will be paid. All seemed well until early last week, when an odd title issue came up. (These are the kind of things I always get in my cases, which is why I don’t do real estate anymore.) This particular bar exam question involved a mortgage he took out to Chemical Bank in 1987. He swears he doesn’t owe it anymore, and I tend to believe him. Still, our local title standards require an “ancient mortgage" of an unspecified term to still be objected to if recorded within 40 years. Probably a reference to Moses wandering around the desert or something.

Normally, tracking down such a discharge is a tricky but doable chore, but Chemical Bank ceased to exist ages ago, subsumed into the JPMorgan Chase oligarchy. Believe it or not, there are still people in corporate organizations who have the ability and authority to track such things down, and the guy told me he was “working on it.”

I didn’t believe him for a second. My friend who has dealings with him was reasonably convinced he had it stuffed in a drawer and was not recording it for strategic reasons. So I put my thinking cap on, and remembered something:

Chase is an odd bird of a bank. They were one of many that stuck a toe  in the upstate water in the late 1970s, when state regulators finally allowed the big New York City banks to operate here. However, they were not allowed to just open new branches. They either had to set up a separate division headquartered upstate, as Citibank chose to, or they could acquire an existing local bank and run that as a separate subsidiary. Chase Manhattan, as they were then known, did both, opening a handful of branches in Buffalo but also acquiring a Rochester commercial institution known as Lincoln First. For years, "Chase Lincoln" was a run essentially as an independent bank based in Rochester. Over that time, they brought in experienced local attorneys from larger local firms for their in-house corporate counsel department. One of them was a guy named Howard. This was not the Howard I knew the best: who was in the firm I joined in  1984, who was an usher at our wedding in 1987, and whose friendship with me ended the day I walked out the door of that firm in 1994. But he knew the Howard who eventually went to work for the bank. In fact, it was a running joke that there was a “Howard club“ of lawyers in Rochester, many of them from the same or adjacent classes a few years ahead of me at UB Law School, who kept in touch for years after they graduated through common case and courtroom experiences.

So now, all those years later, I thought of that Howard. But could he still be there? A good 20 years ago, Chase decided to exit much of the upstate market it had entered 30 years before. It sold its Buffalo branches to M&T, just as Citibank did*, but Chase kept its branches and commercial business in Rochester and Syracuse, where Lincoln First had stomped a bigger footprint.  The bank even kept at least a few local attorneys in their corporate counsel department. Howard was one of them, and he was still listed in my most recent Rochester lawyers' directory from 2016 as still being in Chase Tower with an actual phone number.  Was he still there even now? Would he remember me? And most important, could he expedite delivery of this document?

Well, no. The phone went bood-a-BEEEEEP! as a nonworking number. But a Googling told an even nicer story of whatever became of this particular Howard:

In May of 2016, I retired from a long law career in private practice and as in-house counsel at JPMorgan Chase and began devoting my energies to something more local and values based.

From 2016 to 2020, I served as co-founder and operating manager of "Pencils & Paper" a free school supplies store for teachers at schools in the Rochester community in which greater than 70% of students are eligible for free and reduced meals, including all Rochester City School District ("RCSD") schools.

In the midst of covid, I turned my efforts to assisting with pro bono legal cases (mostly representing tenants) and reading with and mentoring several RCSD students. The reading and mentoring effort began remotely and then shifted to in person meetings in 2021. I am proud to have read and discussed over 150 books to date with one student and have gained a great appreciation for middle school and high school literature.

I also assist with a high school group of young men called the "Talented Tenth" that meets weekly at School 58. The group was formed and is led by Dr. Rita Gaither, a retired long-time RCSD educator. It exposes young men of color to speakers from the community, discussions that encourage personal growth and travel and summer employment opportunities.

I am most grateful for this encore career opportunity to help level the playing field for kids in need our community. It is a labor of love.

Some nerve, a lawyer retiring and doing good things!

I decided not to bug Howard any further about his successors, and found another windmill to tilt at to try to get this document on my own. But then Good Karma entered the room, and the property owner emailed me. Through his own efforts, Chase found the file and is electronically issuing the discharge.  I don’t see it recorded yet, but I have the contact’s email with a real jpmchase dot com email address, so I think it’s legit.

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Some things, I can't do on my own, though. It may take numerous Avengers to Assemble, and here I was just happy to be one of them.

I've mentioned here before that we are friends with a young woman about our daughter's age named Brittany. She's a writer, a poet, a woman about town.  I have not mentioned before that she is also a childhood cancer survivor with continuing treatments and lasting effects from both the cancer and the treatments.  That is only relevant when it is, and two Saturdays ago it became relevant in an important way.

We need first to return to the vagaries of local football scheduling to understand what she went through and why. The Bills play ten home games a year before the playoffs. In all years until three years ago, it was eight  regular season contests and two pre-season exhibitions. After a schedule change in 2021, there's a rotation every two years. Last year was the old-style schedule of eight games that count and two as August "friendlies," if you will. The 2021 season was the first where the Bills had nine real home games and only one pre-season at Highmark. That pattern repeated this year**, resulting in only one game on home turf before the start of the regular season.  The league sets the schedule for that, and it made our one exhibition home game the first of the three, scheduled for Saturday August 12th.

Pre-season exhibition games have always been a bitter pill for fans. Season ticket holders are forced to pay full regular season prices for them, and until a recent change, they were blacked out from local television if they didn't sell out. To help with that, the team has tried turning them into bigger summertime events. One of the games is always promoted as "Kids Day," an afternoon kickoff with more family-friendly pregame activities and, presumably, discouraging of the all-day drunken bacchanalias the real games often become. This year, Kids Day was the one and only home game on the pre-season schedule, and it took place two Saturday mornings ago.

Family-friendly does not mean disabled-friendly, though, and that's where Brittany comes into the story. Early last week, I saw this post from her on her Facebook page, an open letter to the Erie County Sheriff. The county owns the stadium and its sheriff's department provides much of the security and crowd control at the games:

To whom it may concern (a letter on being disabled in able bodied places/Dear Erie County Sheriff's Office):

I took time and space to consider this and do not take it lightly. I don’t often talk about being sick or the things it keeps me from doing, but this is important to me - and visibility is even more important when something like this happens so -

Saturday, my cancer support group took a bus to the preseason Bills game. Now, being cancer patients were all too sick to walk very far - historically we’ve been dropped off and picked up at the gate and it’s never been a problem. This time, your sheriffs wouldn’t allow it.

Our bus driver got off and explained the situation, explained how the ADA prohibits you from forcing a bus full of young adults & teens 13+ with cancer from being forced to walk that far and back and your office didn’t care. When we unloaded and got the wheelchair settled and started our walk we pleaded with you - ending in telling you how blessed YOU must be to not have a child with cancer. How PRIVILEGED you are that YOUR body works and how this situation you were creating was going to end badly - you snickered and looked away.

fast forward to the walk BACK to the bus on the side of the road - i watch the group i came with fade away as i drag my broken body behind them. using the guardrail as a support system i became pinball in the able bodied people bouncing off of me and making jokes under their breath about how “that one must’ve needed a turn single” when i’d buckle against their assault. by the time i got back to the bus everyone was there - the sheriffs in their same spot - i collapsed on the ground because i have necrotic bone in my legs and no cartilage from the steroids and treatments - not a single sheriff made a move to help.

protect and serve? every single one stood there with their arms crossed unphased while i sat crying in a puddle unable to get myself up - our organizer Maggie asking if this is what they wanted? if THIS was worthit to them? not a word. not an ounce of support. not even a hand to get up from the situation YOUR OFFICE chose to put me in KNOWING what would happen.

i am COVERED in bruises from the walk back - i have bruises from my own bones knocking together trying to support myself on the way back to the bus.

DISABLED PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE. DISABLED PEOPLE LIKE FOOTBALL.
DISABLED PEOPLE DESERVE THE SAME RIGHT TO ENTERTAINMENT AS ABLED BODIED PEOPLE.
THE ADA IS IN PLACE SO THINGS LIKE THIS DONT HAPPEN.

now? i’m 28 and don’t want to go to another Buffalo Bills game. i NEVER want to feel that humiliation and desperation again. i NEVER want to look at a first responder and not get acknowledged again. i NEVER want to feel so afraid of being trampled i’m FORCED to DRAG myself along a guardrail in the hopes i’ll make it to the end.

thank you for re-enforcing why this generation doesn’t trust the police when you can’t even do something simple like be kind to a bus full of teenagers and young adults with cancer or literally offer a helping hand up.

if WGRZ or News 4 or anyone else would like to talk, i’d love that and i’m sure several of the other girls in the group would too - because something needs to change. this never should’ve happened.

sincerely,
brittany

Well. WGRZ (our NBC affiliate) has been in touch with her and written about it. The ABC station, likewise. Even the Buffalo News. But the more words, the better, so I reposted her letter and got a response from a friend who works in Rochester public radio:

Emyle Watkins at WBFO is the disability issues reporter. She HAS to cover this.

WBFO being their sister NPR station here: and because of my contact, I quickly saw this:

Ray, Brittany: Please feel free to DM me or email me. I’m going to send my editors a message about this right now. I’m an investigative reporter and my beat is disability rights and equity. I am disabled myself. I am so sorry this happened to you. I would really like to hear more about this and see if we can help dig into this.

I haven't seen her report on their website yet, but we're watching.  We have every expectation that the county and the Bills will find a way to make this right. Because it needs to be.



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* In another case of Everything Old Is New Again, Chase has re-entered the local market with branches popping up all over, some in the line of sight of now-M&T branches they abandoned years before.

** Not all "home games" are at home. The ill-fated series of games played in Toronto a decade ago counted against the Bills' "home" contests in those years, but since they sucked for most of them, it wasn't that big of a deal. Now that the team is so much better, though, losing a home date is a BIG loss, and one of the team's "home" games this year will be played in London. That's just luck of the draw, though, as every NFL team has to surrender a home date every few years to one of the league's international contests.