by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I’m being asked to speak to groups of young people a lot these days. They often don’t have a clue who I am. I find that the less people know about me, the more willing they are to listen to me.

Mostly these are law students or young lawyers. I encourage them to work hard on their communication skills with old people because they’re going to spend much of their career trying to communicate with old people. Old people in black robes.

I tell them I provide good practice in listening to old people. If they can sit and listen to me without being overcome by the urge to race out of the room, they can sit and listen to discussions in chambers with equal decorum.

There is, of course, another good reason to listen to old people. Old people have seen a lot.

This is especially apropos when it comes to old lawyers. I sat in a lot of courtrooms in my career, and by the time I was finished, I knew where a lot of the landmines were.

For example, I was a young prosecutor at a time when the high-dollar civil and felony criminal calendars were called simultaneously in Department One. That meant I got to spend a year watching the great Bob Banyard preside.

One day I was sitting there when a civil lawyer tried to explain away his failure to do something in a timely manner. I don’t remember what it was. The ensuing fireworks display pretty much obliterated my memory of everything else.

The attorney seemed to me to be doing fairly well until he ‘splained that the problem was that his secretary¹ had made a mistake.

Banyard went off like Vesuvius. There were people in Ventura who called 911 to report they’d seen a bright light in the sky to the south. At ten a.m.

He was on that guy like ugly on a bulldog. He walked up one side of him and down the other while our pupils dilated.

And I, who knew nothing about the nuances of civil practice, now knew one indisputable thing: blaming it on somebody else is bad strategy.

I walked out of there that day having learned one very valuable lesson: it’s not the secretary’s fault. It’s your case. It’s your name on the papers. You gotta own the mistakes.

At about the same time, I learned another valuable lesson in the calendar court. I was sitting there waiting for my case to be sent out and listening to the District Attorney’s calendar deputy—who had much more experience than I—deal with the various defense attorneys.

The calendar deputy was Brian Brown, a fire breather who was about as easily intimidated as a glacier. Lloyd Freeberg, a perennial nominee for the world’s nicest man, came up and told Brian that he hadn’t gotten his discovery and would need more time.

Brian groused and grumbled, but ended up asking Lloyd how much time he needed. Lloyd said six weeks.

Brian did a very good imitation of a bear who’s just stepped into a trap. Howls of pain and anger. As I recall, he even danced around a little bit to illustrate his outrage.

Then he told Freeberg to pick a date six weeks hence and said he’d try to have the discovery for him by the next morning.

Five minutes later, the biggest jerk in the criminal bar—let’s call him Xerxes so we don’t have to discuss libel law—approached Brian at the podium. He said he hadn’t gotten his discovery and would need a continuance.

Brian didn’t even look up. “File your motion, Xerxes.”

Now I had been up against Xerxes more than once. He was an excellent lawyer, one of the best I ever saw. But he was also a pain in the ass worse than any ever inflicted by the world’s clumsiest proctologist.

He had the same problem as the nice guy and wanted the same remedy. And yet the nice guy got a remedy, and he got sentenced to several more hours of work for the chance of a remedy. Because he made a habit of treating everybody badly, he got treated badly himself.

It amazed me he hadn’t figured that out. This was a smart guy. This was a guy who could read and express the law as well as anybody I ever ran into. And yet he hadn’t figured out that his life was infinitely harder because of his chronic, abusive incivility.

When I was a trial judge, I had an attorney who gave me nothing but trouble for five days. I had several run-ins with him, during which he was routinely snide and snarky and sarcastic.

I tried to maintain judicial decorum. Several times I interrupted him mid-diatribe to suggest we discuss this out of the presence of the jury.

At the end of the trial, which he lost, I was talking to the jurors in chambers, and they weren’t much interested in discussing the issues. All they wanted to talk about was “that smart-alecky” attorney and how glad they were he had lost.

For the first time, I realized what a bad idea it is to get into arguments with the trial judge.

Jurors typically like the judge. This is almost certainly the first one they’ve ever met. They came in with a default position of respect, and if he or she has been at all human, they’re favorably disposed toward him/her. It does you no good to let them see you as on the other side.

Another thing. This is a lesson I learned in my first months on the Court of Appeal: Don’t just do what you’d planned; pay attention and do what the situation calls for.

Appellant’s attorney spoke for five minutes at oral argument and drew no questions. I immediately lit into Respondent’s counsel about a position that I made abundantly clear I had not found convincing. It turned out Justice Crosby was unconvinced as well and when I finished, he hammered the attorney for several minutes.

During that beating,² Respondent’s attorney relied on something that wasn’t in the record. That drew Justice Wallin into the fray, and he was, as you would imagine, quite outspoken about counsel going outside the record.

By the time the poor guy sat down the entire panel had thrown rocks at him for twenty minutes. He was so badly bruised he looked like a two-week-old eggplant.

And at that point Appellant’s counsel got up to speak again. He’d barely opened his mouth when Crosby spoke. “Counsel . . .”

“Yes, Your Honor?”

“Do you think there’s anything you could say that could make things any better for you than they are right now?”

Counsel was silent for five-to-ten seconds, then he put his carefully prepared closing argument in his pocket, said, “No, Your Honor,” and sat down.

I like to think I’ve learned from that exchange. I’ve now given my editor the number of words she requested, and I hope I’ve provided some valuable advice.

I don’t think there’s anything I could say that could make things any better for me than they are right now. I’ll sit down.

BEDS NOTES

1. We had secretaries then; now we have assistants.
2. Let’s call it what it was.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.