A day like any other...I had one of those experiences that makes me proud to be a lawyer.

A bit of background, first. To supplement my income, I do court appearances for other attorneys, where I can use the same cunning and guile that all of you have come to know and admire. The two areas I usually get work are in bankruptcy and unlawful detainer (ie., the procedure by which the owner of a property evicts a tenant), although for the right price, I will handle other sorts of cases as well. There are about four attorneys who use me exclusively to do their appearances, and it provides me enough money to get by, even when my normal caseload isn't high.

Last night, one of my sources decided to freelance my services. Just before midnight, I get a phone call asking if I would be available to do an appearance at the downtown L.A. Superior Court on a motion to set aside an entry of default. The way the intermediary described it, the hearing would be a slam dunk: our client had been improperly served with the complaint in the unlawful detainer, filed a Motion to Quash Service, only to have the court enter default the following day. An entry of default, btw, is a clerical ruling which notifies the court that a party has been served with a complaint but has not filed a response. If you are a defendant and the other side has entered default, that is a bad thing. The hearing had been held over a day due to the other side not stipulating to having the case heard by a commissioner, and the attorney of record had to be in Victorville (about 150 miles away) on another matter.

Since I was going to be downtown anyway, on another case, I agreed, and gave him my home phone number, which also doubles as my fax number. Bad Move !!! First, because the attorney he was working for didn't get around to actually faxing me the documents until two in the morning. Second, because said attorney decided to fax over eighty (80) pages of repetitive filings in that case. Third, his fax machine couldn't handle the strain, so it frequently broke down in the wee hours; that, of course, meant that my phone rang repeatedly between two and four in the morning. And fourth,...we'll get to that later.

With only a few hours sleep, I drag myself down the Cahuenga Pass to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse downtown. As I'm arriving, I get a phone call from someone who identified himself as "Joe Marmon", counsel of record for my client. He basically tells me that the hearing is a slam dunk, and that there is no way I can lose, and that the judge told him at the initial hearing yesterday that he felt that the opposition was in such bad faith that he wanted to impose sanctions. My bullshit detector immediately went off.

Arriving in court, the judge immediately called our case, and began grilling me as to how I was retained in this matter. After about five minutes of obtaining the minutiae of my legal background and education, he asked if I had ever met Mr. Marman or my clients, what I knew of them, etc. As it turns out, at the appearance the day before, a number of other attorneys had recognized him under another name, as a lawyer who had been disbarred a decade ago. According to the right honorable judge, the only attorney licensed to practice law in the state of California named Joseph Marman practices law up in Sacramento, and that this case was news to him.

As you might have guessed, things didn't go well from there. Regardless of whether the judge bought my story, I had been exposed in a courtroom full of lawyers as a "front", an attorney whose practice exists only to provide a public face to a grifter engaging in the unlicensed practice of law. Needless to say, the judge threw out the motion, adding insult to injury to the real victims of this scam, the clients who had unknowingly retained a conman to prevent their eviction.