Went to my local Chipotle in KC metro area. Got two bowls, ready to pay and kinda nervous about saying I wanted the BOGO promo.
THE manager just waved me though. I was trying to hand him my card and he told me, "Our payment system is down, there is no way to take your payment. Your food is free."
Wtf! Is this local or did the entire country crash from this offer?
It was a line out the store getting free food. Ouch.
IRS sized my joint tax return with my wife. My wife's tax return was siezed. There is an injured spouse form you can fill out 8379 with the IRS. I filed this for my wife in late May. Just got acknowledgement and the money returned today. Roughly 11-12 week wait time but it is possible.
My Eidl loan has been in collections for a while. 1m+ roughly owed after penalties and interest.
Strategically I chose not to file for bankruptcy because of pending lawsuits that may satisfy the debt.
Hope this helps someone. It was nice to see it worked.
I need advice, but mostly I need to understand what is wrong with the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas.
For context, my name is John. Senior Litigation Partner at a V10. My father, who is also named John and is a founding equity partner and absolute legend, basically built this firm’s trial practice with his own hands.
Around the office, everyone calls me King John II, mostly because my father signs their bonus checks. I went to Harvard Law, where I was criminally overlooked for Law Review despite running the most efficient exam-taking operation in 1L history (I paid a foreign LLM student for their outlines and wired five grand to a proctor during Secured Transactions). I was born for high-stakes litigation. I have zero moral compass, four million dollars in liquid assets, and a handicap of 3 at Baltusrol.
Which brings me to my current nightmare.
I am currently being systematically dismantled in federal court by a solo practitioner wearing a suit from Men’s Wearhouse and a "CEO" who runs a mid-tier gravel supply outfit somewhere in Kansas.
KANSAS.
Do these people not look at court captions? Do they not see the four rows of counsel entries from our NYC and DC offices? My billing rate is $1,850 an hour. My opposing counsel looks like he prints his own business cards at FedEx Kinko’s and went to a state school that doesn't even have a squash court.
The worst part is that they don't know they are supposed to lose.
In a normal case, you hit a small-time operation with three emergency motions to compel, a 180-page request for production, and a deposition schedule that forces their attorney to miss his daughter's baptism until they agree to a quiet five-figure settlement. That is the playbook my father refined in the nineties. It is flawless.
Except this guy just... answers the discovery? In two days? By fax?
Last week, during a motion hearing on our simple breach of contract claim, I spent fifteen minutes explaining to the judge, a former Federalist Society chair who I know for a fact went to Exeter, that opposing counsel’s interpretation of our agreement violated the basic spirit of commercial sanity. I cited four Supreme Court dissents and quoted Cicero in the original Latin.
The opposing lawyer stood up, adjusted his reading glasses, held up a single laminated piece of paper, and said, "Your Honor, the plaintiff's own CFO signed a mutual termination agreement in red pen three months ago."
The judge ruled against us on the spot.
I was so stunned I almost dropped my Montblanc. I looked over at the CEO. He was wearing steel-toed boots with a suit. He smiled at me. He didn't look intimidated. He looked like he was thinking about a sandwich. He doesn't care that my grandfather has an entire rotunda named after him at Penn. He doesn't care that I have a private driver waiting outside in an Escalade that costs more than his entire corporate portfolio.
Why aren't my tactics working? We filed a 90-page brief on Tuesday accusing them of spoliation because their site foreman didn't preserve three years of internal text messages. They responded with a handwritten affidavit saying they communicate exclusively via CB radio. How do you depose a CB radio?
I had a full panic attack in the courthouse handicap stall and had to call my dad on speaker.
That was when the secondary crisis began: the cover-up. Dad told me to stop whining, take a Xanax, and immediately draft an internal memo blaming the entire summary judgment loss on a third-year lateral we recruited from a T30. He is currently handling the Executive Committee so they don't revoke my origination credit. We are scrubbing my middle initial from all CourtListener entries, drafting a press release to announce a "strategic cross-licensing resolution," and petitioning to seal the entire docket on national security grounds.
If anyone asks the firm, I was never in Wichita.
So now I am sitting near Gate 4 at Eisenhower National Airport, drinking a double scotch out of a plastic cup, watching a guy in a high-vis jacket eat a cinnamon roll.
This is my second shitpost based on real life turned into parody to help maintain my sanity. This post is not about me. It is mocking an Attorney. The represention he thinks is himself.
I see people talking about how they can't or won't do jury duty. I get it. But consider a different perspective. A perspective of a person who has dedicated their life to what I wrote below. Its written in the blood sweat and tears of good honest people.
A jury runs the most powerful country in the world. It is the last uncorrupted institution in our country. You can bring an out-of-control corporation to its knees. You can send a powerful child predator to prison for the rest of their life. You are the boss. The end decision. Everyone has to respect and follow it.
Take that power seriously.
Here's how you use it to change the world for the better.
1. Hold corporations and insurance companies liable for the maximum you can award.
If a corporation or insurance company makes it to trial, they've done something really terrible, and it's going to cost them. An often cited number is that 98% of cases settle. Sometimes ego or greed doesn't want to pay the bill.
Make them regret it.
In civil court, you can only take money from them. Take it all. Award hundreds of millions in damages, and don't stop at what the plaintiff is asking for. The award needs to go beyond the ask, as a preventative measure. It sends a signal to every boardroom watching: don't fuck around with people's lives.
Right now the power dynamic is too far in one direction. Corporations treat lawsuits as a line item, a cost of doing business. Your verdict is how that math changes. It needs to shift hard enough that they feel it.
Don't ever believe a high-priced lawyer. If you see a $5K suit, they earned it by lying. You don't need a high-priced lawyer to tell the truth. You need them to game the system and fool a jury. When you see that suit, know what it represents.
If we collectively hold these corporations accountable, it forces them to change tactics.
2. Protect our society from powerful predators.
If someone in power is accused of corruption, hurting a child, or stealing from the poor, send them to prison.
Dirty cops deserve to be put under the jail. Give them the maximum. Police unions rarely let cops get charged. If a cop gets charged with a crime, they fucked up really bad. You just need to follow through and make sure society is protected from them if they don't plead out.
3. Unjust charges.
District Attorneys are wrong sometimes. They take innocent civilians to trial and get convictions for crimes they didn't commit.
When a civilian is accused and won't take a plea deal, I find it's typically for two reasons. Either they're innocent, or the crime is so brutal their life is over anyway if they plead, so they have nothing left to lose by fighting it.
I'll admit that's not the whole picture. Some people go to trial because of bad legal advice, a mandatory minimum that makes any plea look almost as bad as a conviction, or a public defender who never had time to walk them through their options. I hadn't weighed that enough.
But whatever got them to the courtroom, my job as a juror doesn't change. I'm skeptical until I see clear and convincing evidence.
4. Jury nullification.
Some people are guilty of a "crime" I don't agree should be a crime.
Jury nullification is one of the most powerful tools a juror has. It happens when a jury acquits a defendant who technically broke the law, because the jurors decide the law itself is unfair, the punishment is too harsh, or its application in that case is unjust.
I find these fall under victimless crimes or crimes against state authority:
Simple drug possession
Obstruction of justice
Resisting arrest without violence
Disorderly conduct
Failure to disperse
Loitering
Vagrancy
Unpermitted public food sharing
Unlicensed professional practice
Unapproved sale of agricultural goods
I'm not going to pretend this is some clean, morally spotless move. During jury selection, they'll ask if you can be fair and follow the law as instructed. People lie about that constantly, on every side of the courtroom, from cops to prosecutors to witnesses. I'm not holding myself to a higher standard than the system already ignores.
Lying for a just reason isn't a compromise of your integrity. It's the point.
You're not there to help a broken law do its job. You're there to make sure it doesn't get to use you to do it.
Ever have a defendant dissolve an asset holding entity in the middle of litigation, try to hide it and refuse to turn over Financials.
Imagine you found out this information in networth investigation for punitive damages right before trial.
Trying to be vague but happy to hear anyone's tangential experiences or reactions.
Believe me I have plenty of thoughts about this.
Bob petit, the Big O and Elgin Baylor are seriously underrated.
Clyde was the weak link here.
I don't think I could do better than this.
Last roll was for bird.
At 6:15 AM today, my Sikorsky S-76 touched down on the roof of our Midtown office. Our Head of Tax tried to claim seniority. I reminded him that his rolling 30-day billable collections barely qualify him for an UberX, let alone a peak morning landing slot. Air superiority goes to origination, not tenure. He can take the Queens Midtown Tunnel with the commoners.
We publicly justified the new helipad as a "frictionless logistical conduit" for our Tier-1 PE sponsors.
The logistics have been seamless. Rather than waste money on FAA ground crews, we’ve integrated tarmac management into the first-year associate rotation.
This morning, I watched a Harvard grad clear a flock of pigeons off the pad with a broom, then use two illuminated highlighters to guide my descent through the fog. He got aviation fuel on his suit, but he gained invaluable operational exposure.
Hypothetical of course.
Let's say a firm starts to roll up an industry and makes 11 acquisitions and for a multitude of reasons is starting to look insolvent. The operators of the main entity see the writing on the wall and decide to take some really aggressive choices, some that involve things that are illegal in an effort to turn things around. They get caught and there are lawsuits mostly civil. They get bad press and are forced to quietly liquidate the companies at a massive loss. Maybe the senior lender calls the massive notes due? The company changes hands with no press. The vendors and customers are none the wiser but the liability has shifted to a new PE fund (PE fund 2)
PE fund 2 gets a sweetheart of a dead but assume the liability of the lawsuits. PE fund 1 is circling the drain. Investors wont fund new ideas and their best talent starts to flee. They start to wind down their investments and liquidate as much cash to the partners as possible.
PE fund two thinks PE fund 1 is healthy and has a escrow to cover potential judgements against their new company but they don't.
When these lawsuits prevail and PE fund 2 realizes PE fund 1 fucked them over hard, what happens?
PE fund 2 doesn't want to pay and their new investment is now insolvent. PE 1 is riding off into the hills with most of their cash in Personal trusts.
What happens? Any real life parallels you have seen play out?
I've lived in 4 states, one for most of my life.
The recency bias regarding 50s through 70s NBA players has gotten out of hand. The default dismissal is always some variation of "they played against unathletic competition."
We do not use this lazy logic in other sports.
Baseball fans universally respect Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Hank Aaron. Nobody claims modern pitching or specialized analytics completely invalidate their dominance. THEY adjusted to their eras and left their own mark on the game.
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Look at horse racing. Secretariat set the Belmont Stakes record in 1973 in the most dominant race Ive ever seen. Think about the massive advancements in breeding, tracking, nutrition, and equine sports science over the last fifty years. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to engineer a faster horse. Yet, that horse holds records in all three Triple Crown races that may never be broken. I highly suggest you want this race. Gets me everytime.
https://youtu.be/AG\_27cCW5bw?is=y1pUe3S5UMkdimyu
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True greatness is measured by the gap between an athlete and their contemporaries. If a player separated themselves from the rest of the league by a massive margin, that is the definition of elite capability.
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Penalizing older players for lacking modern sports science, advanced footwear, and chartered flights is a logical flaw. If you dropped prime Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell into today's training pipelines from childhood, they would still be physical anomalies. Dominance is dominance, regardless of the calendar year.
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Despite all of today's advancements in science and nutrition, modern players rarely stay on the court for an entire game. The older generation played all 48 minutes in canvas sneakers with no load management. I respect talent across every era, but assuming something is inherently superior just because it is recent is absurd.
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