CCII Episode 43 - Trial Admissibility Seminar - Discussion of Odom v. L.A. Community College District

Robert Sallander presented at the Santa Clara County Bar Association's Civil Practice Committee's seminar on Trial Admissibility on April 24, 2025. The following is an except from that presentation where Bob discussed the Court of Appeal decision Odom v. L.A. Community College District. Stay tune for other highlights from this seminar on admissibility. 

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Transcript

Welcome! You are listening to Coverage Counselors In, a weekly podcast for insurance claims professionals. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It should not be considered legal advice. No attorney -client relationship is created or implied. For legal assistance, contact a lawyer licensed in your state. And now your host, Robert Sallender.

Hello, my name is Joshua Gilliland. I am an attorney with Bob Sallender. On April
24th, 2025, we had the privilege of presenting Trial admissibility,
a seminar for the Santa Clara County Bar Association Civil Practice Committee at a
live seminar hosted at McManis Falkner in San Jose, California.

This was a fantastic seminar where we discussed case law, rules of evidence, admissibility, and the participants broke up into small groups
where they were given a hypothetical where one person played a plaintiff attorney,
one person played a defense attorney, and they had sample evidence and a witness that they had to authenticate and meet all the admissibility requirements in their small groups. This part of the seminar is where Bob led a discussion about a recent evidence case in California. Odom v. Los Angeles Community College District, which came out on April 7th, 2025. You can pull the case on Lexis at 2025 Cal App Lexis 225. It's a fascinating read and tune in for our discussion of this case.

Before I to the substance, I want to talk about a case that came down recently
called Odom versus the Los Angeles Community College District. Have any of you read that decision? It just came out, I think it was April 9th. Have you sent? No.
Okay. Well, yeah, yeah, so, so I, I would not want to be that judge. So let me give you a couple of lessons that I took away from it, and I'll tell you better about the case. And then if any of the judges want to make a comment, I'm sure we'd be interested to hear their perspective. But this was a sexual harassment retaliation claim bought by a tenured professor against the L .A. Community College District, and it got pretty graphic when you read the 36 -page opinion, some of the things that the bad guy was alleged to have done and said and all these kinds of things, but it was disputed. So the plaintiff said he said certain things and he said I did not and she said that he was called into his office on certain dates and proposition and that kind of thing and then there was college district evidence that he wasn't even on campus at that time so there was a lot of back -and -forth evidence and it's really interesting to me how I got to trial that probably had to do with the amount of the settlement demands and offers but this went through a complete trial where a lot of graphic evidence and testimony was put on and some documents were put into evidence that that you know tended to sway the case one way or another and I'm being a little cryptic there on purpose The jury came back with a 10 million dollar award in favor of the plaintiff and So there were some post trial motions and
during the course of the post trial motions the defense attorney sought to have the
judge removed and so another judge came in and reviewed the grounds and all of that and the judge was was disqualified and so did not rule on the post trial motions, but the case went to appeal. Well, if you ever wanted to be mentioned in an appellate decision, and who doesn't? We all want to have our name there so that, you know, when somebody types into Lexis or Westlaw, they find you. Well,
you don't want to be this judge in this decision. Because the last line of the
opinion from the Court of Appeal is something to the effect of whatever else this
judge's motivations had been for making these evidentiary rulings,
one thing was clear. They were not based on a devotion to the rules of evidence
and it's very rare that you see a case where the in a civil case anyway where the
Court of Appeal says that the court abused its discretion in allowing in evidence
and that was all over the so for example Some of the documentary evidence that was allowed in were 20 -year -old expunged misdemeanor convictions of the defendant for doing something that was not related to what was alleged to have been done to the plaintiff. Some of the testimony that was allowed in was of people who claim to have been harassed or otherwise mistreated by other people within the college district. And you can kind of say, well, that's relevant if they're talking about the college district stuff, but here are two points and the takeaways that I want to give you as lawyers before I turn it over to the judge. The first thing is, and you should write this down, when you are offering evidence,
you need to know why you're offering it, and you need to be very clear on that.
You need to, if you have to practice saying it, practice saying it, or at least
write it down, make sure you know why you're offering the evidence and then don't use it for a different purpose. So what happened with some of this evidence that the Court of Appeals said should not have been entered, the plaintiff's lawyer said, "I'm offering it because it had an impact on the context of the plaintiff for how she felt and reacted to certain things. And context is sometimes,
you know, you have to get that in. So that's what the plaintiff offered it for.
And then in the closing argument, argued that the reason the jury should award money against this defendant was because of all that conduct that somebody else had done to somebody else long before. So the lawyer used it for the purpose that every human being wants to use it for look at what a bad guy this guy is and look at how bad the community college district is and you should be incensed against them making the argument that no person should ever be going to these schools should ever be with you know as long as this guy is here a whole bunch of stuff and that figures figures prominently into the Court of Appeal decision. Thank you for listening. We will be back with future episodes with other highlights from this live seminar.