TO-WIT: ASK ME NO QUESTIONS

by S. Sponte, Esq.

She came into my office carrying a scowl with the morning mail. The message couldn’t have been clearer if she had been carrying a bullwhip instead. It could only be interrogatories!

My secretary does this every time interrogatories come in the mail. She knows how it affects me, how it conjures up for me the image of Indiana Jones in Raiders Of The Lost Ark as he stood above the just discovered entrance to the long buried map room. Bullwhip at the ready and peering down into the yawning darkness below him, he could hear those unmistakable hissing sounds.

“Snakes,” he said in a voice quaking with both fear and revulsion, “why did it have to be snakes? I hate snakes.”

“Interrogatories,” I say to her in a voice quaking with both rage and more rage that sends her scurrying for cover, “why did it have to be interrogatories? I hate interrogatories.”

Used to be I always had some young lawyer in the office to take on the odious chore of answering them. Now that I’m alone in my practice, there isn’t anyone else to do it. Well, almost no one.

“You know,” I told her, “I think you’re finally ready to move up to the role of legal assistant.” I could tell she was less than enthusiastic by the rapidity with which she locked herself in the bathroom. Apparently she still remembers how I elevated her to office manager on the eve of the IRS audit.

So I began to read this latest set of interrogatories myself. As usual though, I didn’t make it past the first question. Its always the same: List the names, with addresses and phone numbers, of everyone you know in the world. (Use a separate sheet of paper if necessary.) I didn’t know which was sadder - that I had to prepare the answer or that my client wouldn’t need a separate sheet of paper.

In part I hate this because it requires me to organize and pay attention to the facts of my case. The truth is I’m just not a facts kind of guy. Call me an idealist but I find that all too often facts only tend to muck up an otherwise perfectly wonderful case.

But it also has a lot to do with how barren every lawsuit looks when facts are reduced to interrogatory answers. Just like deposition transcripts, they are devoid of the emotional embellishments of inflection, are stripped of feelings the way the sun melts off the snow. The resultant cold nakedness transmogrifies a lawsuit from a living, breathing, often traumatic human experience crying out for righteousness into something more resembling a hard number which, by the all too simplistic prefixing of a dollar sign, makes all aright. Strip an answer of voice, you strip it of humanity. What you have then is just another statistic, and a mercenary one to boot. Where’s the fun in that?

If I’m going to put my blood and guts into a case, I need that voice, I need it like I need the air. Without it, my blood and guts are perfectly happy where they are.

Oh sure, I know that clients are entitled to the very best I can give them, no matter what. But when it comes to answering interrogatories, the very best I can give them is my secretary. And she can’t stay locked in that bathroom forever.