I was an attorney for an insurance company defending a lawsuit where the plaintiffs were two girls who claimed they were irreparably harmed and their lives would never be the same because severe back injuries kept them from being active. They forgot to set their Instagram accounts to private and the accounts were full of pictures of them riding jet skis, dancing, and pictures of them at the gym. The underage drinking pictures were just icing on the cake.

When I compared the scanned copy of the deed provided by the other side's lawyers to the original my client eventually got around to providing. The scanned copy provided by the other side had a witness signature. The original did not.

My mom hit a guy on a bike with her car in a parking lot. She claimed he hit her (she also wanted to counter sue the cyclist for scaring her) in her deposition she started every sentence with “when I hit him...”

Parent termination case I was prosecuting. Dad went on how he has changed his life around and worked the AA program. Asked him what step he was on, and he proudly proclaimed 3. Asked him what step three is, he had no idea. Then asked him step two was. Again, no idea. Parental rights terminated.

My friend was defending a guy who was asleep in the backseat of his car while intoxicated and a NYS Trooper arrested him. On the stand, the trooper testified that he visually saw 'the key in the ignition.' My friend gave him like three chances to walk it back. 'Are you sure, trooper, that you actually saw the key in the ignition?' He said yes. And then my buddy dropped the hammer, 'You are aware that my client drives a Toyota Prius?

Very abbreviated - I was prosecuting a convenience store owner for luring a young girl, who regularly came into the store, back to a part of the store to grope/fondle and kiss her (child enticement). It was the only section of the store without surveillance camera coverage. They were in the back room for about two minutes and seventeen seconds, per the timestamp on the videos. Of the many arguments the defense put on, one was there was no way there was enough time for anything to happen. In my rebuttal on closing, I asked the jury to imagine what could happen in the room in that amount of time, and I asked them to all close their eyes while I timed out 2 minutes and 17 seconds on my watch, in silence. After about 60 seconds two of the jurors started crying. Knew it was going to be guilty right then.

“Your honor, I have screenshots.”

At a termination of parental rights proceeding: State: Ma’am, when was the last time you used illegal substances? Witness/bio mother: I used meth this morning before I came to court She is no longer a legal parent to that child.

A thief robbed someone's houses in the winter in Colorado, and all the police had to do was follow the footsteps back to his house where he was hanging out with the stolen items and a small amount of drugs and a sh**ty handgun. Idiot.

Obligatory, not mine but my Moms story. She was fighting for custody on behalf of the father, trying to prove that the kids were living in subpar conditions with their drug addict mother in spite of the ample child support provided. It was a tough case because courts are so hesitant to pull kids away from their moms. Then the mom burst out that she had been feeding the kids cat food as proof that she wouldn’t let them starve. Needless to say, the judge didn’t take that as a good reason for the kids to stay with their Mom.

My client was riding his motorcycle on a relatively calm street when this guy exited his garage, without looking, and run over him. In deposition, the guy brought a witness that was with him on the passenger seat. The whole time, the witness maintained that my client was driving too fast and that there was no time to brake the car. I asked him the same question a few times in different ways, making him tell the story again. In the fourth telling, he, already a bit frustrated, let it slip: “- Look, I’ve already told you. We were exiting the garage and, as soon as I lifted up from getting my cellphone on the car’s carpet-” “- Wait. So you didn’t even see the crash?” There was no coming back from that.

I knew the cops beat up my client and framed him. They described a knife in his possession that “caused them to fear for their safety.” Oddly, they never seized it. We won the criminal case and filed a civil rights case. While deposing one, he described the knife in detail. No more than three minutes later, he slipped up and claimed his partner told him my guy had a knife, but he never saw it himself. I told him, “that’s not what you just said,” and saw him panic. His lawyer panicked too and asked to see me outside. When we got in the hallway, I withdrew my settlement demand, and the case settled for a substantially larger amount within 45 minutes.

Not as a lawyer, but a defendant. I was a concierge and named in a lawsuit against the building by an unlicensed realtor who was barred from entry after headbutting me while he was wearing a bike helmet. He was representing himself in court. He cross examines me over how I had barred him from entry and had some preamble about the vendetta I had against him. Then asked me to repeat what I said when I asked him to leave the building. I responded, "I'm sorry, was that before or after you hit me?" He immediately answered, "After I hit you." Took him a minute but his face fell pretty far after he caught on to what he just admitted. Case dismissed.

This lying lifter said he couldn’t work and had back injuries after a minor car accident. I found a video of plaintiff squatting 300 pounds the month before his deposition.

I trapped a defendant pretty badly one time. He testified in a deposition that he had a green arrow for his left turn, and that my client ran the red. Unfortunately for him, the additional turn lane arrow was installed two months after the wreck.

I'm not a lawyer, but I took my old landlord to court when I was in college. They stole my security deposit over bulls**t: They claimed I "trashed" the place, not knowing that I took pictures and video when I moved in and out. Their "evidence" was a VHS quality recording of going through a perfectly clean apartment in better condition than it was when I moved in, but then they opened up the top of the stove and found a single piece of elbow macaroni under it, holding it up triumphantly. That was the crux of their "defense", the judge was not amused and I got all my money back plus my lawyer fees and the filing fee. She then fought against her own lawyer to avoid paying him. As**ole. Edit: Any time you move into a place, take pictures, take video, make notes about any damage. When you move out, do the same thing along with noting any repairs you made. Pretty hard to argue against solid evidence. Protect yourself.

I was reviewing the transcript of an interview with a child. The child made incriminating statements against my client. At one point, when discussing the allegations, the child used an odd word, but I didn't think much of it. A few days later, I was watching a video of the child interacting with their grandmother (who hates my client) from about a week before that interview. The grandmother used the exact same odd word in the exact context the child later used it. At that moment, it became clear that child had been coached. It was the first real "ah ha!" moment of my career.

They said, 'This document doesn't state our company's name, so we are not involved in the settlement.' I said, 'Line 4 specifically lists the company as the defendant, and then the company is referenced to in lines 13, 27, and 33.' I swear, if you read the documents, you're a better lawyer than 90% of the ones out there.

I had a client who was accused of taking a young woman's car and then crashing it/fleeing the scene. The girl testified at trial that she had given him the keys that night because she was drunk and "would never, ever drink and drive". Apparently she was not aware that I had requested and obtained a copy of her driving record which showed she received a DUI a month after the incident. I still remember the look on her face when I handed her driving record to her and said "Except for that one time you got caught a month later, right?" The look on the judge's face was equally memorable.

I worked on a case involving defective processors. In discovery we got emails from the defendant’s engineers that had worked on the processors. They were in an Asian country but the emails were in English because they were going to US executives. One of the more senior engineers basically laid out the exact defect we were suing over, explaining what the problem was and why it was their fault, and finishing with “this is big problem, we ship CRAP to customer!” Needless to say we hit them over the head with that in mediation, and they settled shortly after.