> I’m not entertained that the court is playing an unrealistic and hyberbolic game.
They did not. Jones was given years and dozens of opportunities to comply. He defaulted in 2 cases because he failed to comply in both cases. He was also defaulted after being warned he'd be defaulted. The cases literally started in 2018 and resolved in 2022. The reason they dragged out for so long is primarily due to Jones not complying with court orders. Constantly having to retake depositions where the same incomplete and non-compliant answers were given.
And he appealed (and lost) the appeal for the default.
Multiple judges saw his default and concluded "This was a reasonable way to handle an unreasonable litigant".
His lawyers were terrible. Nobody arguing otherwise on that point. Jones wasn't personally directing the legal strategy, he was doing the same thing you'd do.
> Jones wasn't personally directing the legal strategy, he was doing the same thing you'd do.
Yes he was. Jones didn't have 1 set of lawyers from start to finish on the cases. He went through about 20 different lawyers in both cases.
That doesn't happen if a client isn't personally directing the lawyers.
His strategy was very clearly to bring in new lawyers at each depo that didn't comply with the court order. When challenged, the lawyers would say "Oh, sorry, it's my first day on this case. We'll be sure to bring it next time".
He did the same thing with the corporate representatives. He had at least 3 different people show up as the corporate representative that were supposed to bring the finances. None of them complied.
His lawyers were objectively bad. You'd bring in a new team and fire them also.
Example: they sent a copy of his cell phone to the prosecuting attorney on accident and didn't request it back in time, so 2 years of his text messages were used against him.
That was literally the last lawyer he had which ran the trial (Reynolds).
And the reason his lawyers were so objectively bad was because they all had about 1 month working on the case before getting fired and replaced by a new lawyer.
Meanwhile, the plaintiffs had exactly 1 set of lawyers representing them (1 in TX and one in CT).
I'm not joking when I say that Jones went through about 20 different sets of lawyers throughout the cases. You can listen to his various depositions and there's not a repeat defense lawyer in any one of the depos. I highly doubt they were all just uniquely terrible, especially given how much money Jones has. A few were really terrible (Norm, Barnes). Reynolds was actually one of Jones's better lawyers, he just messed up. Unsurprising given how little time he was on the case.
IIRC, the reason for the phone copy getting shared was because of the case hand-off between reynolds and the previous lawyers. The TX lawyers were CCed when they shouldn't have been. And in the process of getting ready for trial, reynolds missed the email informing him of the mistake.