The stereotype is true: There's a shocking amount of dishonesty in litigation. This is ironic, because formally at least, the legal system is built to demand honesty and punish dishonesty. But somehow the legal culture has come to accept an enormous amount of dishonesty. I do not accept that. The following excerpt is from a motion I filed in 2026:
It cannot be that Dr. [redacted] is as limited in knowledge as her interrogatory responses make her out to be. Presumably she and her lawyers thought the misrepresentation of her knowledge was permissible. After all, this is litigation, and it's conducted through language, and language is always to some degree indeterminate. So who's to draw the line between falsehoods and harmless word games? And don't lawyers do this sort of thing all the time? How can it be held against this Defendant when others do it so often?
That sort of argument would do more to condemn than to exculpate. Who's to draw the line? The Court, that's who draws the line. Do lawyers flirt with dishonesty all the time? No, but they do it often enough — and that shames us as a profession. The law does not recognize an "everyone does it" defense. (And not everyone does it.)
The Defense will want to say Dr. [redacted]'s responses were so obviously false that it was Plaintiff's burden to file a motion asking the Court to compel honest answers. But as shown above, that is not the law. A party is bound by what it swears to. It is not Plaintiff's job — or the Court's — to protect Dr. [redacted] from unwise falsehoods.