My co-hosts adamantly deny they defamed me. Solid legal-speak. (It is also totally irrelevant due to settlement.)
But for the non-lawyers out there, a “denial” is a far cry from suggesting I filed a lawsuit that lacked valid claims. Doing so is not appropriate for anyone, much less a licensed attorney.
In truth, my co-hosts, after a fair assessment, understood that packed away in the Complaint was a valid Defamation claim. (Podcast: ~25:00). What few people bothered to ‘white-knuckle’, including my co-hosts, were the valid trade speech claims beyond a Defamation tort.
Nonetheless, for my litigation strategy to work as it did, I needed to include both
a) valid claims preferably in multiple counts (“in the Alternative” counts are even better, but multiple worked here)
and
b) to appear unhinged.
“Lean into crazy” ~39:00-39:40.
But the second part is only necessary when winning or losing isn’t the “most important thing.” One has to have a lot of “conflict experience” to understand that “winning” and “losing” are ego constructs and often with dollar figures attached. If I care a lot about money, then I care a lot about winning money. That’s the fairway. Sometimes, you can win more than money and that’s by signaling that “winning money is not my primary concern.”
Most professional attorneys cannot “Lean into Crazy” worried that the particular strategy choice will create a “loss” – and particularly a loss of money.
My strategy was “Start with Valid Claims, then add as much Crazy as needed” to signal that winning or losing money was not a primary concern. It was not.
The Episode describes how and why it worked. ***It also reminds law school students not to try this at home.*** Let this lesson come with that fair warning to my law students in the “Litigation as Strategy” Week 2 lesson at UCLA!