I know the Ninth Circuit was trying to be nice; indeed, generous. But appellant's counsel not only "cite[s] two cases that do not appear to exist," but also "misrepresent[s] the facts and holdings of numerous other cases cited in the brief" (citing over a dozen such authorities). It's so bad that, based on "an opening brief replete with misrepresentations and fabricated case law," the panel dismisses the appeal entirely. (The panel doesn't speculate as to why the brief contains citations to two apparently made-up cases, but that sometimes happens when people use ChatGPT to write briefs; I can't tell one way or the other whether that's the problem here.)
I read the brief. It's . . . not good.
When an attorney's brief is so bad that the appeal gets dismissed, and the client thereby injured, my take is that the attorney should generally be sanctioned and/or reported to the State Bar.
Yet the panel here apparently does neither.
This is not an attorney who's just started practicing law. The lawyer -- Angela Swan of Torrance -- has been an attorney for over twenty years.
I know that the underlying dispute is a civil rights case, and that the lawyer here is trying to do what she perceives as advancing social justice. So the panel might understandably be hesitant to be exceptionally harsh to someone on such a mission.
But, sometimes, you've got to be cruel to be kind. It doesn't help to encourage bad lawyers to take on important cases that then get dismissed for terrible lawyering.
