Posted by Frank Chin on February 25, 2002 at 09:09:46:
Hi Pam:
Don’t go crazy over this, and in time you’ll learn to laugh about it. By then, you’re a pro.
My friend started his life as a legal aid lawyer specializing in fighting landlord evictions. He used every trick in the book. The biggest weapon is to get numerous postponements to run up the landlord’s legal bill.
If your tenant did not get an empty envelope, he’ll claim illness, stress caused by eviction etc.
My dad did an eviction once and called a family friend, an retired litigation attorney. This attorney told him to go down to court himself. “Why??”, my dad asks. The wise old attorney said "Because when the tenant’s attorney see that you’re there alone he’s not running up a BIG TAB, he realizes he’s really wasting HIS TIME.
My dad went to court, and the judge said, “are your represented by counsel?” He dad said “no, I can’t afford one”. Judge heard the case, asked my dad to give the tenant proper notice, and said to the tenant attorney, “explain to your client that he must vacate with 30 days of receiving notice”. That was the end of it.
Now it was interesting that my dad played his “dumb Chinaman routine” and the judge said to the tenant attorney “I don’t want to see you guys back here anymore since I can see its going to take up more of this court’s valuable time”.
How’s that for a good strategy “you can’t waste my time, but I’ll waste yours”.
Talking about stressed out by 9/11, I just watched a “Judge Judy” episode on TV where a lady got a flat rate to go to the airport by taxi. When she got there, the airport was closed, and she asked the taxi to take her back home.
She refused to pay to fare going home because they didn’t quote her the rate and she was stressed out by the events of 9/11.
Judge Judy’s answer to these numerous counterclaims of stress had alway been, “if we could all sue for stress, we’ll all be millionaires by now!!”
Frank Chin