I always read carefully cases in which someone sues a law firm, if only for the "There but for the grace of God" aspect of the thing. Particularly when the lawsuit involves, as here, a relatively well-known firm, I'm particularly interested in both the underlying facts as well as the result.
Here, Seyfarth Shaw prevails, both in the trial court (in which the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their lawsuit after receiving the trial court's tentative) as well as in the Court of Appeal (where they get their anti-SLAPP fees increased from the 80% that the trial court granted to the full 100%). So victory for the law firm.
But I also thought it was interesting just how aggressive the plaintiffs were below. Defendants filed an anti-SLAPP motion, and the Court of Appeal's opinion says that "Plaintiffs opposed the motion and submitted declarations and evidence of their own totaling nearly 3,000 pages. Defendants filed a reply and plaintiffs filed a 70-page surreply." That's a ton of pages, particularly the 70-page surreply!
Then there are the briefs on appeal. "Plaintiffs’ opening brief contained approximately 124 headings over 58 pages and their reply brief contained approximately 320 headings over 130 pages. In a few instances, the headings introduce so little as, “[t]he title of this section is incorporated herein by reference,” or even nothing at all. In many others, they are followed by declaratory statements unsupported by legal authority, record citations, or analysis. Further, some factual citations plaintiffs did provide led to material bearing no apparent relation to the propositions cited."
Yeah, that's . . . not good. Aggressive, but not the way to win the hearts and minds of the justices.
So I looked to see who the attorneys were for the plaintiffs.
Ah. Now I get it. They were pro per on appeal. A former linguistics professor at Cal State Fullerton who the university attempted to fire and her spouse. Who are suing the law firm that conducted CSUF's investigation into their harassment allegations and concluded that they were unfounded.
Litigants who represent themselves often get overly wound up in that context. To their detriment.
One last thing. On page 10, Justice Grimes' opinion says: "Plaintiffs argue that fee and cost awards are not mandatory where a plaintiff has dismissed the special motion to strike before it was heard." I'm pretty sure that sentence means to say something like "Plaintiffs argue that fee and cost awards are not mandatory where a plaintiff has dismissed her lawsuit before Defendants' special motion to strike was heard." As Plaintiffs generally don't file (or dismiss) anti-SLAPP motions (and instead dismiss, as here, lawsuits); defendants do.
