Some years ago I had a case against a US Catholic archdiocese for a client who claimed to have been abused by a teacher in his parochial school.
It was a big city, so there were a good many other cases piling up in the courts. Counsel for the Church, for no discernible reason after having not felt the need before, moved to consolidate all the cases before one judge.
The court agreed, and suddenly about two dozen cases, wildly disparate in their facts, were suddenly one giga-case.
The effect was immediate. I was inundated with bales of motions and discovery requests and other legal detritus- all relating to the other cases. If I filed anything in my case, I had to copy every other party to every other case. All the stuff I'd receive I had to read to see if it affected my case in any way, and decide whether to take part in depositions of other pcases' parties and experts lest I miss something that might be useful.
My case was a small one: all the client wanted was an apology. It settled for under $10,000; the client gave the money to charity. I'd taken the case on a contingent fee basis, which meant I'd get paid if the case generated a settlement.
By the time we got to settlement, my time was so disproportionate to the amount of the settlement I waived my fees altogether.
Now, it seems, others are getting similar hardball tactics, even as the Church continues to wring its hands in sadness of the fate of those it failed to protect, and the finding out of those of its own it did protect:
It was a big city, so there were a good many other cases piling up in the courts. Counsel for the Church, for no discernible reason after having not felt the need before, moved to consolidate all the cases before one judge.
The court agreed, and suddenly about two dozen cases, wildly disparate in their facts, were suddenly one giga-case.
The effect was immediate. I was inundated with bales of motions and discovery requests and other legal detritus- all relating to the other cases. If I filed anything in my case, I had to copy every other party to every other case. All the stuff I'd receive I had to read to see if it affected my case in any way, and decide whether to take part in depositions of other pcases' parties and experts lest I miss something that might be useful.
My case was a small one: all the client wanted was an apology. It settled for under $10,000; the client gave the money to charity. I'd taken the case on a contingent fee basis, which meant I'd get paid if the case generated a settlement.
By the time we got to settlement, my time was so disproportionate to the amount of the settlement I waived my fees altogether.
Now, it seems, others are getting similar hardball tactics, even as the Church continues to wring its hands in sadness of the fate of those it failed to protect, and the finding out of those of its own it did protect:
...The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. But the group has been subpoenaed five times in recent months in Kansas City and St. Louis, and its national director, David Clohessy, was questioned by a battery of lawyers for more than six hours this year. A judge in Kansas City ruled that the network must comply because it “almost certainly” had information relevant to the case.
The network and its allies say the legal action is part of a campaign by the church to cripple an organization that has been the most visible defender of victims, and a relentless adversary, for more than two decades. “If there is one group that the higher-ups, the bishops, would like to see silenced,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University and an advocate for victims of clergy sex crimes, “it definitely would be SNAP. And that’s what they’re going after. They’re trying to find a way to silence SNAP.”
Lawyers for the church and priests say they cannot comment because of a judge’s order. But William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a church advocacy group in New York, said targeting the network was justified because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”
Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”
He said bishops were also rethinking their approach of paying large settlements to groups of victims. “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one,” Mr. Donohue said.
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