Learned Hand
Posts: 214
Joined: Oct. 2009
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It did. I looked the case up, as I was curious. I'm not familiar with debt collection statutes, so I may be missing something, but it looks like a penny-ante case to me. The plaintiff was essentially asking for around $1,000 in damages (she asked for it in many different counts, but I don't think she could have persuaded the court to give it to her) plus attorney's fees. Not the kind of thing that would sink a healthy practice, even if she did get $1k for each count of the amended complaint. In the end the plaintiff apparently backed down and dismissed her own case. In theory that could mean it settled, but I doubt it here.
(There are a lot of indications that it was a casual, somewhat careless suit--the plaintiffs had trouble following the court's rules, suing the right party, and serving the defendants. In my experience, a docket that looks like this indicates a pro se plaintiff, inexperienced or incompetent counsel, or decent counsel running too many cases at once. But that's just a casual guess based on a scan of the docket, I didn't read many of the documents.)
Arrington responded by personally filing a motion on his own behalf, which attorneys (a) typically say is a foolish thing to do, but (b) sometimes do anyway when faced with relatively small matters. His motion is about what you'd expect: aggressive and overwritten. He tries some rhetorical flourishes that are as graceful as dead ducks and makes a silly demand that the court sanction the plaintiff and her counsel. (Silly in this case because there was no real chance the court would grant his request--he didn't even make a serious attempt to justify the demand. The most likely effect of such a request would be to annoy the court.) Nothing that impressed me as either particularly good or bad advocacy.
The only interesting thing about the case that I noticed is the identity of his company. The plaintiff sued "Barry K. Arrington Law Office, LLC." He told the court that the LLC has been defunct since late 2012. The Colorado Secretary of State says he incorporated it in early 2011, though. I don't know why you'd scratch up a new LLC for an existing law practice then let it go defunct in just two years. There are probably good reasons that I'm not familiar with, as I've never been a solo practitioner. But I'm curious.
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