You know how some days are just hard to figure out? Are they good days or bad days? I’m a little confused about today, so let me explain. First of all it’s Friday, probably the most popular day of the week because the work week has ended and yet the household chores of Saturday have not begun. I know that young people are starting to push into Thursday night as the big “date night” of the week, presumably because all that remote working of the past few years probably did some redefining of the workweek schedule and maybe because no one was watching. But Friday night has always been and I think remains a fun moment in the week and deserves the assignation of “Thank God It’s Friday”. I know that Kim and I aren’t really on a workweek schedule anymore, but even I can feel good about Friday’s because it means that whatever work missives are due to come my way, they are less so on the weekend and I suppose that makes Friday a better launching point into a few more carefree days.
This week, I got asked on Wednesday if I could do a deposition in the case I wrote a report for while cruising around Cape Horn. I agreed despite the fact that the opposing side was determined to make my life difficult and insisted on a start time of 7am Miami time…or 4am San Diego time. Not being a person who is unable to take a nap if needed, I agreed to the timing and figured I would just go to bed early and then muscle through. Depositions are usually limited to one 7-hour day of interrogation, but apparently the civil procedure rules in Florida are a bit different. This is a matrimonial issue and that too may make the whole thing different since I’m not sure how often they invoke expert witnesses in matrimonial matters. Then, on Thursday morning, as I was downloading and copying my report to use during the Zoom deposition, I got an email from one of my client’s lawyers, relaying the motion from the opposition about the deposition. It said the deposition would not be limited to one day and did not specify the 7-hour rule I am used to. It also had a list of eleven types of documents I was to produce 24 hours before the deposition. I got the email 21 hours before the deposition. I decided to forward all the client email exchanges to our lawyers to let them decide about those and had my associate Giulio put a transmittal file together of all our Dropbox files on this case. It was a bit of a fire drill, but we got it done. I went to bed at 9pm and set the alarm for 3:30am.
I did a quick review of the report (luckily I am a morning person, so I awake pretty alert), suited up above the waist and logged into the Zoom meeting. There is nothing like being sworn in at 4am by a court reporter to get your motor running. The opposing attorney was actually quite nice and polite. Respect among litigators is not always easy to come by, but this started off without any issues. In fact, compared to most depositions, it was pretty mild. He never once questioned my qualifications or the relevance of my opinions to the case at hand, but he did want to make it clear that I was not a Florida matrimonial law expert, which I am not, and that the delineation between marital and non-natural property and the segregation rules pertaining thereto were not in my province of expertise. There were no surprises in this and I had been certain to clarify all of that with the client prior to even taking this assignment. My job was to do a financial analysis of what the client COULD have had prior to the marriage some 27 years ago. I did that through a detailed prospective analysis of his likely accumulation of assets up to the marriage and then a decumulation analysis based on the portfolio in existence when the divorce was filed a few years ago. This was about triangulating on the amount of money the client must have had to be able to build the portfolio he did and how his income on Wall Street could have reasonably created that pool of funds. Prior to the marriage. We were coming at the number from two directions and my analysis showed that they did indeed converge reasonably well on a number that the client claimed he had (he was lacking in proper records given the long time since then). In other words, this was a heuristic analysis. I have always thought that only has so much value to the case, but the client felt it was worth spending the money for the opinions regardless.
The good news was that besides being polite and respectful to me, the opposing lawyer was also pretty efficient and did not resort to the repetition of asking me the same question in different forms over and over again. All he seemed to want to establish was that my analysis and opinions were based on a theoretical portfolio, compilation, and theoretical accumulation, which was certainly the case. And all I wanted to get across was that the triangulation analysis I performed very much converged quite sensibly and with economic reasonableness on the number my client suggests he had when he entered the marriage. We finished in only three hours, which meant that I was actually able to get back into bed at 7 AM (not that sleep was forthcoming). That left me with the start of my day on Friday available to do whatever I chose.
I spent the morning working on my Italian citizenship documentation which ultimately involved me going to the UPS store with a set of document request forms to send off to the states of New York, Nevada, and Florida to get original documents, including birth certificates, marriage certificates, and the like to complete the judicial file of documents needed for the Italian citizenship case that will come later in the year. One stop at the UPS store for some notarizing and stamping and I was done with my chores. That’s when I decided after a visit to the bank to stop in for a massage, which I do much less regularly now than I used to. While on the massage table in a building in the middle of a local shopping mall, I heard a car crash in the parking lot. For a moment, I found myself saying “somebody’s not gonna be happy with that situation“. A few minutes later one of the Management Team at the massage clinic came into the treatment room and asked if I was driving a Ford F150 lightning truck. Sure enough it was my truck that had been smashed into.
That took a little bit of the relaxation out of my massage treatment, but I got up, got dressed and went out to the parking lot to find a middle-aged woman, quite fearful of what she might encounter with some pick up truck yahoo. There it was, my not-so-pristine truck with a crunched front right bumper and fender. All the woman could say was how sorry she was and that she had just looked down for a moment…. I went right away to the collision repair shop recommended by my dealership and by the end of the day I had a $6,500 estimate For the repair.
Good day, bad day? Just another funny Friday.