When I was 43 I got sued. It was a surreal situation; the client got in trouble by going against what I recommended, and then contended that I was incompetent. After all, his lawyer charged, if I had been effective then surely the client would have followed my recommendation. The fact that he went contrary to my advice (and got caught) meant my advice was too weak.

Talk about a no-win situation. Worse, what landed the client in trouble was a crazy insurance policy, and the crooks who sold it were my co-defendants! So when I finally got the case dismissed I took care of the crooks along with myself, which was not very satisfying but so it goes.

The painful part of the adventure was in the beginning. When a lawsuit starts, especially if the attacking lawyer is not talented or moral, you get called appalling names. Accusations are made willy-nilly; mud is flung with the hopes that some of it will stick. You feel attacked, naked, vulnerable.

And the wheels of the court system grind slowly. There are filings, hearings, postponements, discoveries, depositions, more filings, and many delays.

In the beginning I felt like there was a sword hanging over me, maybe to drop and take what all I owned. As the time (two years) passed, I grew accustomed to the names, the delays, the frustrations and ironies, the sword. When it was over, after the ex-client apologized and the case was dismissed and a bit before the ex-client went to prison for defrauding insurance companies, I missed it a little. I’d gotten used to that sword.

I file the experience under “shit happens.” I didn’t deserve it but it wasn’t that bad. I learned from it. I got to choose my attorney and act as my own expert. Here’s the best of the sonnets that came out of the concluding deposition.

A stone-topped table big enough for 10
is centered like an altar in a room
with walls of glass. Around it sit 6 men
and half as many women, who consume
conditioned air. Their fingers pull the sill
of oak that frames the stone, tenaciously,
as if they’d make it levitate, or fill
it like a lifeboat in catastrophe.

For 2 long days they ride that rocky craft
through reefs of argument and glassy greed.
Past bitter misrememberings they waft,
till currents push them clear and then recede
to beach them like a sandbar, with the hiss
of leaking air: dismissed with prejudice.