Minimum Safe Distance: Docket 1

Prologue

Wanna hear about the weirdest trial I ever had?

This is a story about how a little, tiny, nothing of a case turned into one of the most daunting double backflips of my mediocre professional career. Mainly, it’s about how COVID-19 took litigation that was already unnecessarily challenging, and turned it into the stuff of nightmares. A word of warning: this is a legit story about how law is really practiced. Well, sort of. Think of it like a law school hypothetical: the facts are absolute lunacy, but the tools we use to get to the outcome are the ones we actually use in court, in real life.

When we’re in law school, we always think these weird hypotheticals in law school exams can never happen…but they do. All the time. More often than not, our clients come to use because they’re in real trouble. If their cases were cookie-cutter, by-the-book affairs, they wouldn’t need us. And if you’re a lawyer, and you think about it, your more memorable cases usually had some little fact—some small, loose thread—that led another loose thread, and another, and another, and pretty soon you found yourself trying to keep the remnants of the sweater that is your case together out of a pile of yarn. Because that’s what law really is. It’s a way to put things back together, to restore them, so they were never pulled apart in the first place. It’s a discipline that we all agree is designed to reverse the course of time, or at least, come as close as we can to it. It’s why people are so interested in things like law, and medicine. Medical professionals work to stop, and in some cases, can even reverse the ravages of time on the body. Legal professionals work to stop or reverse the ravages of time on the human everything else.

So, this tale is based on a true story, but it’s going to be done in a truly lawyerly way. That means, among other things, that you are going to see things from a more practice-based perspective. That also means that the events depicted are not entirely true, but merely truish. I have to guard client confidences, after all, and keep a host of other things secret. You’ll just have to take me at my word. And I promise that most of you, dear readers—even the lawyers—might even learn a thing or two. Because even for a story about 2020, this one is weird. And, of course, it’s all…