Win A Dream Date With A Litigious Douchebag!

Housekeeping note: The Popehat Report is moving to a different platform later this month. It should be seamless for subscribers: the mailing list should transfer. It’s possible you’ll need to fish it out of junk mail the first time. I’ll let you know.

What makes a good lawyer? Is it arrogance? Peevishness? Obsession with minutiae? Capacity to endure being yelled at by elderly white men? At least one good suit? It is all of these things. But being a good lawyer shares a fundamental rule with being a good doctor: first, do no harm. Lawyers encounter people in crisis, and their first duty is not to make the crisis much worse.

This is a straightforward task if you stay in your own lane by practicing the sort of law you know, or relying heavily on more experienced lawyers to learn a new area. But lawyers who blunder alone into unfamiliar areas of law can make things catastrophically worse for clients. My favorite example is defamation law. Under exceptionally speech-protective American law, any defamation lawsuit faces a daunting array of legal barriers and pitfalls. It’s not rocket science, but a lawyer who doesn’t know the law will fail in flamboyant, expensive, and humiliating ways. Moreover, defamation cases proceed under the looming shadow of a crucial social law — the Streisand Effect. That’s the proposition that if you sue, or threaten to sue, over a nasty thing someone said about you, it will inevitably draw orders of magnitude more attention to that nasty thing.

It’s common — mundane, really — to see lawyers try their hand at a defamation case, fail miserably because they don’t understand the law, and utterly destroy their client’s reputation in the process. Today’s story is a prime example.

Nikko D’Ambrosio is a Chicago 33-year-old employed in the age-appropriate activity of wandering about society in a backwards hat trying to get laid. One of the young women he dated wrote about him on the Chicago chapter of a popular Facebook group called “Are We Dating The Same Guy,” a forum for women to commiserate about the men they date. Her gripes (as reflected in the exhibits to his eventual lawsuit, linked below) were, to my taste, rather mild: unflattering, but not outside what’s expected of modern manchildren. She said he was “clingy very fast,” that he “flaunted money very awkwardly,” that he “kept talking about how I don’t ...