Celebrity & High Profile Lawsuits: A Guide

If you've been following true crime but lawsuits make your head spin, this is the video for you! I'm breaking down the civil process, including all the insider information about how it really works in practice. Most importantly, I point out all the ways the media coverage can manipulate whats really happening, so you can read between the lines the same way I do. 

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The information and ideas expressed in the allegedly golden podcast for legal explanation and legal analysis, not legal advice. While I am a lawyer, I am not your lawyer. If you need legal advice, please contact a licensed legal professional in your area. My opinions are my own. For better or for worse. Welcome to a special episode of Allegedly Golden. Though I do have the regular things with me, I've got my Dia Cove. Frank is snoring within a couple of feet. So maybe you'll get some Frank ASMR in the background, which I don't know about you, but relaxes me and puts me to sleep. The reason today's episode is special is because I'm doing something that I've wanted to do for a long time. And that is to give a general overview, a primer about following celebrity lawsuits and high-profile civil cases in general. As those of you who've listened to this before know, this is my specialty. I've been a civil lawyer and dealing with civil litigation for about 25 years. And following civil cases is very different from following criminal cases just because of the way that the cases work. And as I am covering particular cases, I find myself needing to explain some of those differences all along the way. And so I thought it would be a good idea and be helpful to people for anyone who is starting to follow a high-profile civil case, whether it's a celebrity case or a case involving companies, to just get like the high-level overview of how these things are different and in particular, how the media can cover them in a way that is manipulating the listener, or at least attempting to. So for the entirety of this episode, I am going to talk about the basics of celebrity and high profile civil cases. So hopefully this will be a refresher for some of you. It might be new for others of you. If you have friends who are interested in watching maybe only one civil case, they're only interested in, you know, Brad Pitt versus Angelina Jolie, and they don't really care about anything else. This will help them to understand that better. But as you see these things pop up in the news, because at least in the United States in 2026, we have become a very litigious society. Frankly, misinformation and um and manipulation because people just don't understand. So if you walk away from this episode knowing nothing other than, okay, when I read that, I know somebody's trying to sell me something, then I will have done my job. Let's start with how civil cases begin. The thing with civil cases is there really is no filter or approval for how they begin. Anybody can file one. You don't have to ask anybody before you do it. You don't even need evidence to do it. So unlike in a criminal case where it has to go through some sort of filter of the government and the district attorney or the U.S. attorney, some sort of filter that says, we've decided we're going to bring this case in our capacity as a government entity. And a civil case, that does not have to happen. Literally anyone, any individual, any partnership, any corporation, anybody can walk into a court and file a civil case any old day of the week. They don't have to get approval from anyone. Put a pen in that. There are some things that can sometimes happen before a civil case is filed, but you don't have to get approval from anyone to be able to file a civil case. And part of the reason for that is because you don't need evidence to file a civil case. That is one of the things that is misunderstood the most often. What you need is a legal theory that has a basis in fact and a basis in law that you can make an argument about. Most of the time, the only filter that something like this is going to go through before it lands in a court is a lawyer who decides, okay, I see a basis in fact and a basis in law for at least making the argument to start a case. But that is the only filter that there is. You don't even have to have a lawyer for many civil cases, unless you're filing on behalf of a corporation, you don't even have to have a lawyer. You can file pro se. So the bar for filing a civil case is extremely low. And that is why it differs so much from a criminal case. By the time the state or the government brings a criminal case, it has gone through a full investigation, an assessment of what the law is, some sort of filter. Sometimes it even goes through a grand jury process, and then the decision to charge is made. In a civil case, none of that happens. The only thing that has to happen is that there has to be a basis in law and fact at a minimal level, and somebody has to have the money to pay the filing fee, which is usually a couple of hundred dollars. Civil cases are about compensation. The civil system exists to compensate people for injuries that they have sustained. Those can be physical injuries, but they don't have to be. They can be business injuries, they can be profit injuries, they can be emotional injuries, but it exists to compensate people for their for their compensation to it for their injuries. No one is going to jail in a civil case. Now, sometimes there are cases that are happening in the civil court that have a connected criminal case, like for example, the Lindsey Clancy case, where you've got a criminal case against Lindsey Clancy, and you've also got Lindsay and her husband filing civil cases for medical malpractice against the doctors that treated her. But a civil court judge does not have the power to imprison anyone. No one is going to jail. Unless maybe there's like contempt on contempt on sanctions on sanctions on sanctions, in which case they can throw you in the pokey for like a day just to stop you from abusing the court. But even that doesn't happen very often. Most of the time, the punishment in civil court is money. And the reason for that is because we want the systems to be separate. When you are potentially going to take away somebody's freedom, there has to be a hell of a lot more due process than there does when you're just going to take money out of their bank account. Now, I know that on the ground, for real people, taking money out of your bank account is no small thing, right? It's not to say that having somebody take money or enter a judgment forcing you to pay someone all of your money isn't a big deal. It is. But it isn't as big of a deal as being locked up or even having your life taken. Because of the differences in civil court, the terminology is different. We do not use the word guilt, and we do not use the word innocent. I've seen a lot of times in a lot of high-profile cases people throwing those terms around about guilt and innocence. Those are not civil words. They mean nothing in a civil court. In a civil court, we are looking for things like liable. Is there liability? Is there responsibility? That can be fair. But we are never talking, no one in a civil court is ever going to be found guilty for anything. They can be found responsible and they can be found liable, but they're not found guilty and nobody is declared innocent. Side note, footnote, people aren't declared innocent in criminal cases either. They're declared not guilty, but that's another conversation for another day. So the language really matters. If you see an article or a post or somebody talking about a civil case and they're talking about guilt and innocence, that is a huge rudder. Civil courts have completely different procedural rules than criminal courts do. All systems, there's the federal system and then 50 different state systems, and DC, I guess, um have their own procedural rules. And there are different procedural rules for criminal cases than there are for civil cases because they are so different, because they run so differently, and because the time frame is different. Civil cases are much, much slower and they take a lot longer to litigate for a couple of reasons that I'm going to talk about, but not the least of which is there's no such thing as a speedy trial rule in the civil case, because again, those constitutional rights don't apply because no one's taken your freedom. And because in a civil case, most of the case is discovery. So when you are looking at what's going on in a civil case, you have to look at the civil procedural rules, the federal rules of civil procedure, the California rules of civil procedure, the criminal rules of procedure matter zero. They don't matter at all. It's a completely different set of rules. So how does all this work? The first headline you'll usually see is somebody sues someone. Right? Jane sues Jack. Bob sues Jim. Even that headline can be deceptive because of what it means to sue. There are two different questions that are baked into that headline. Somebody sued somebody else. Did they file a lawsuit against them, or did they serve them with a lawsuit? Those are totally different questions, legally and procedurally. When somebody files a civil case, they pay the filing fee, they go to the clerk. Right now you do it online in most places, you give them the filing fee, and they literally open a file. Like they open a file folder and they're like, here we are. Here is Jane versus Jack. They give it a case number, they put it in the in the pile to be assigned to a judge. Doing that creates no responsibility whatsoever on whoever is being sued. If you are being sued, if you are the defendant, we use the terms plaintiff and defendant. Defendant is the same as the criminal, but plaintiff is the person doing the suing. If you are the defendant in a civil case, you are not in the case until you have been personally served with the complaint and something called a summons that you get from the clerk of court. You do not have to answer, you do not have to respond, you do not have to appear. If there's a hearing, you don't have to go. You are technically not a defendant until you have been served. And the reason that distinction matters is because in many, many cases, there's a long period of time between the filing and the service. Sometimes someone will file a lawsuit, open up a file in the clerk's office, it shows up on the clerk's website as saying, here's this lawsuit, here's the case number. But weeks will go by before the defendant actually gets served and brought into the case. Sometimes that's because the defendant is trying not to be served. Looking at you, Sam Lansky, from the Amy Griffin case. It has been months and he has still not been served because he has been hanging out in Europe where they cannot get to him. So when you read a headline that says so-and-so sued someone, the first question is was it filed or has the service actually happened? Because that will make a difference in terms of the timeline, in terms of when the next thing is going to occur. All states and all and federal law have different timelines for how long you have to serve someone after you file a lawsuit. Um, the default is like four months. Um, if you can't serve them within four months, sometimes the case gets dismissed and you have to start all over again. But if you see a headline that says Jane sues Jack, question is it a file or is it a serve? What do we know? Has a summons been issued to the plaintiff to go and get the defendant? Because that's the other thing that happens. You can usually see that on the docket. They file the complaint and they say, give me the document that I'm allowed to then go and serve this on the defendant. There are cases that are filed that are not intended to ever be served. They are just filed for headlines and leverage. And one of the easiest ways to tell if that's what's happening is to see if service has occurred or if they've even asked. Like I said earlier, one of the biggest differences procedurally in civil cases and criminal cases is that there's no constitutional rights, right? You have general due process, like, you know, you have the right to cross-examine witnesses and you have the right to, you know, make sure that evidence is admissible. But all of the main constitutional rights that we think of in America don't apply because those only apply when somebody's trying to take away your freedom. So the biggest ones are, you know, again, there's no speedy trial rule. In the criminal system, if you are charged with a misdemeanor, they only have 90 days to try you. And if it's a felony, they have 180. Now the defendant can wave those and say, I need a little bit longer, I'd like a little bit longer. But the clock starts right away. Remember also, I'm going to talk about this multiple times, that the reason in criminal cases why they can do that is because the evidence has already been gathered. The police have investigated it. It's been through all those filters. In a civil case, it hasn't. In civil cases, there is primarily no need to prove intent. There are a few types of claims, like intentional infliction of emotional distress, is one of them. There are a few types of civil claims where intent is required. But for the most part, you do not have to prove intent when you are suing someone in a civil court. You just have to prove that a law was violated and that that caused you injury. And because of that, that changes a lot of the due process needs, including testifying against yourself. So everybody knows that in criminal cases, we have the Fifth Amendment, which says you can't be forced to incriminate yourself. So if you are charged with a crime, there is no requirement that you testify on your own behalf, and the jurors cannot consider the fact that you didn't testify as evidence of your guilt because you have the right not to do that. That is not the case in a civil matter. In a civil matter, you can take the fifth. You can say, I'm afraid that if I admit to these civil law questions, I might be criminally charged. The difference is that it can be held against you. If you're in a civil case, whether it's in a deposition or a hearing or a trial, and you're the defendant and you refuse to answer questions and say, I'm not going to answer that on the grounds that it might incriminate me. Whoever is sitting in judgment of you, whether it's a judge or a jury, can use that against you and can assume that the fact that you took the fifth means that whatever you would have said would have been bad for you. Can't do that in a criminal case. You also do not have your Sixth Amendment right to have counsel in a civil case. You can, if you're an individual, there's no requirement that you have a lawyer. Now I will tell you, if you don't, the judge will hate you because it makes their job harder. In civil court, corporations, entities that are not individual people are required to have lawyers because, you know, you can't, there's no one person that's that's the party, right? It's a whole group of people. But nobody pays for it. You got to pay for it yourself. So that rule doesn't apply. Civil cases are a long game. It's a real long game. And it can be frustrating as a watcher because in criminal cases, you know, in some high profile criminal cases, they'll wave speedy trial and it'll go on for a while. But it's it's more like you get the satisfaction because it all goes pretty fast. Someone's charged, and then there's hearings, and then there's suppression hearings, and then there's a trial, right? In civil cases, it doesn't work like that. It is a long slog. Um, now cases can resolve themselves, and I'll talk about that. But if you're assuming that a civil case is going from beginning to end, you are in for a long, long tail. And the reason, part of the reason for that is the biggest reason for that is, as I said earlier, you don't have to have evidentiary support to file your complaint. You just have to have enough information that you have a basis in law and fact for whatever claim you're making. So let's say you're making a breach of contract claim, right? All you have to do to file a civil case for breach of contract is to allege in good faith that there was, in fact, a contract, that there was a provision of the contract, and that that provision was violated, and that that violation caused the plaintiff some sort of monetary or other injury. That's all you have to have. You don't have to prove anything to anyone to start the case. And a complaint itself, I cannot stress this enough. A complaint in a civil case is not evidence of anything. I think Emily Baker uh is a fan of saying it's nothing but allegations and shade. It's true. A complaint is not evidence, and this is critical. Neither are the things attached to it. Just because a complaint has text messages and emails and letters and stuff attached to it, those things aren't evidence yet either. Because they haven't been authenticated as being real and complete, and they haven't been noted to be admissible evidence. They are just allegations. Now you can look at them and be like, if this all turns out to be what it looks like, okay, I see where they're going. But a complaint, even with attachments, is the beginning. It is a document that says, here's what we think is true. And we're bringing this case to make sure that we can find the information to later prove that it is. It is proof of zero. So when you see a high-profile civil matter and you get your, you know, you get a chance to get your hands on the complaint, whether it's because a media organization attaches it, or whether you go and find it yourself or you see it from somebody like me, it tells you what the plaintiff is alleging, but it proves nothing. It's just somebody's story. It's just somebody's story that they're saying, I believe in this story enough that I'm going to bring this case and see if I can prove it. That's all it is. Now, in terms of the filter, I said before, you don't need a filter, right? To file a civil case, anybody can do it. There are some types of claims where there are like administrative things you have to do before you can file the case, like check the box, right? So as we saw in Lively Baldone, if you're going to sue somebody for employment discrimination, you have to first go through an employment equal opportunity employment agency and get what's called a right to sue letter and say, I've gone through them, I submitted my complaint. You can even tell them not to investigate it. You just have to go through the motions of filing it and then getting this right to sue letter before you can file the case. It's not a substantive determination, it's just checking a box. There are some types of claims, particularly if they're over contracts and things like that, where there will be conditions put in the documents you're suing over, right? If you're going to sue me over breach of this contract, first you have to give me notice and give me 30 days to fix whatever the problem is. So sometimes there are, we call them conditions precedent, conditions precedent, whichever, um, that you have to check a box before you can file the case. But that's not because anybody makes a substantive determination about whether it's a good or bad case. You can file a charge with the EEOC, for example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and they can say, There's absolutely no merit to this. This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. There's no way there's any discrimination here. Give you a right to sue letter, and you can turn right around and file that thing in federal court as if it never happened. So again, There's no filter. Anyone can sue anyone. Another key component and a huge difference in civil cases is that there are counterclaims, right? Can you imagine if criminal defendants could sue the state back? What a disaster, a clusterfuck that would be. So in a civil case, you don't want to have people litigating the same stuff like all over the place. So all claims that arise out of the same nucleus of operative facts, which is the circumstances of what the original case was about, have to be litigated in the same case. So if you sue somebody, that defendant may be like, you know what? You didn't like what I did in that business transaction, but I didn't like what you did either. So I'm going to sue you back for something different. All of that has to happen in the same case. And sometimes civil cases can get really complicated that way. You can have the original claims by the plaintiff against the defendant. Then you can have counterclaims by the defendant back at the plaintiff. Sometimes the defendant will bring in a third party to say, not only did I not do this, but I know who did. And so if you're going to sue me, I'm going to sue them and bring them into this case to take all the heat off of me. So it can get really complicated really fast. But that has to happen. Otherwise, you will just have litigation spread out everywhere. And that would be just, you know, a dumpster fire. So just another thing to note about civil claims. This happened in the Lululemon versus Costco case really fast, which is that Lululemon sues Costco for trademark infringement and patent infringement and all this stuff. And really quickly, Costco turns around and sues them and brings somebody else in. Because in these big cases involving really complex like webs of corporate structures, everybody wants everybody there so that you can work it out all at once. And sometimes that can be hard to follow, but that's okay. That's what I'm here for. If there is a dollar amount in a civil complaint, like someone is suing for $100 million, right? You see a headline that says Jane sues Jack for $100 million, and you pull up the complaint, and that's what it says. 99.9% of the time, that legally means absolutely nothing. You do not have to allege the amount that you claim to have been injured in a civil complaint, except to the extent that it has to be the dollar amount that gets you into whatever court you're in. So there are different levels of the civil court system, and they're based on what's called the amount in controversy. So, like a small claims court will be things under $5,000, county court will be things under $15,000. And then circuit court will be things above $15,000, stuff like that. So the only reason for putting a monetary amount in there is to make sure that you are able to get into the court you want to be in, or for PR. When Wayfair and Justin Baldone filed their case back against Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds and Leslie Sloan and all those people for $400 million, that $400 million was for us. Legally, that had no meaning whatsoever. Damages in civil cases, the actual amount that someone has been injured, the amount that they're trying to recover, is actually an element of proof that you do not have to prove until you go to trial. So when people put dollar amounts in complaints, most of the time it's just a guess and it's just for all of us to see because it does get headlines, to be fair. If you want someone to know, like, I'm super pissed about this, then you put a whole big dollar amount on it and it will get reported because that will get clicks. Legally speaking, though, it means very little. Now there is that 0.1% of cases where you are suing someone over a contract that has like a liquidated damages clause in it, which is something that says, if we ever have a dispute about this and you claim that I did something wrong, you're gonna pay me a million dollars. Right? If the amount has already been decided by some sort of contract or ancillary document, then you put that in the complaint, right? Hey, the comp you breach the contract, and the contract says if you breach it, I get a million bucks. So where's my million bucks? But I just, you know, people will see that kind of thing and think, oh, they're gonna get $400 million. No, they're not. That hasn't even been calculated by an accountant or anything because they haven't even started to do the discovery on what their damages are and how much they can actually recover, which is a whole thing in and of itself. The other thing that people, people, media, love to breathlessly cover is that a jury trial has been requested, right? Jane sues Jack for $500 million and requests jury trial. Five exclamation points. Guys, in a civil case, again, it is not a criminal case, you do not have a constitutional right to a jury of your peers because no one's taking away your freedom. So in a civil case, if you think you might even want to have a jury, maybe you're still not sure. You have to ask for it or you've waived it. If you file a civil complaint and you don't request a jury trial, that could be malpractice. That could be legal malpractice. So it is not news in any way, shape, or form that someone has put request trial by jury and I'll count so tribal. That is literally in every civil lawyer's template complaint. Because if you don't ask for it, you can't have it. If you don't put a jury trial request in there, and then six months into the case, you're like, you know what? I think this would actually be better in front of a jury than in front of a judge. And you ask for it, you will get denied. Because everybody has to know up front what is our end game here? Is it a bench trial, which is a trial with a judge? Is it a jury trial or is it something else? So I always just get a good giggle when they're like, jury trial requested. And I'm like, well, well, yeah. Breaking news, sky's blue, basically. Another thing that happens early on in the case is motions to dismiss. So when someone gets sued in a civil court, they essentially have four options. They can do nothing and get defaulted, which means basically they lose by silence. They can call up the person who sued them and be like, let's resolve this. I just want to settle it. They can file what's called an answer, which is a line-by-line response to everything in the complaint that states what is disputed and what is undisputed, and then lays out their affirmative defenses. Or they can file a motion to dismiss. And a motion to dismiss is a document that says, we think some or all of the things we've been sued for are inappropriate and we shouldn't be sued for these things. And there's a delicate balance here because a motion to dismiss is what we call a dispositive motion, meaning it can dispose of a case if it is granted. Right? If someone files a motion to dismiss and says, I want this whole case dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can never be brought again, that can occur. That happened recently with Howard Stern. It can occur, but it doesn't necessarily have to. There are a million reasons to file a motion to dismiss, even though you know that the case probably isn't going to get thrown out. One of them is for leverage if you are entering into settlement. Can you all hear Frankie? You snoring real loud. It's a good one. Um, one of them is for leverage. If you're engaged in settlement negotiations, you're like, okay, we'll file a motion to dismiss. Maybe your case is going to get dismissed. How much do you want to, you know, lower that amount now? Right. So it can be done for leverage. It can be done because there are 12 claims and you think only four of them are good. So you move to dismiss the other eight. And you're cool if the four are left. It can be a delay tactic. Because if you file a motion to dismiss, you have to wait for that motion to get fully briefed, sometimes argued, and an opinion issued by the judge before you can move into discovery. So if you're a defendant and you don't want to get to the discovery part, you file a motion to dismiss, to delay. There are also opinions on a motion to dismiss that don't throw the case out. There's dismissal without prejudice, which means I agree that the way that these claims are drafted is not legally appropriate, but I'm gonna let them try again. Talk about delay. That shit takes forever. So when you see a motion to dismiss, I see a lot of headlines like this. So-and-so moves to dismiss the case, moves to throw out the case. It's probably technically accurate, but that requires me to look deeper. Are they actually asking for dismissal with prejudice? Are they asking for everything? What are the grounds? Are they just trying to whittle down the claims from 12 to 8? Are they filing motions to dismiss that they know won't be granted because they just want to get a couple of extra months where this thing sits around on a docket waiting for an opinion? So when you see a headline or a post that says they've moved to dismiss, it's rightfully a big deal in the sense that a motion to dismiss can throw a case out and end it. But it's also important to note that most of the time it doesn't. All right, so now we get to the meat of a civil case. Most of a civil case is discovery. Most of what happens in a civil case is the discovery of information by the parties. Plenty of people file cases simply to get information from others. Because as soon as you file a case and as soon as you get into a case as a defendant, you both have subpoena power. Now, being in the case yourselves, you can get any information you want from each other. You don't even have to use a subpoena because you're both parties in the case. You can say, give me all these documents, answer all these questions. Um, but you also have subpoena power for people and entities outside of the case. You have full subpoena power for third parties, and you don't need anybody's approval to do it. The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply here. You don't have to get, you know, anybody's sign-off. You don't have to get a judge to say, yes, it's okay, you can get that. Yes, you have probable cause. You send your subpoena, and if somebody doesn't like it, they can challenge it, they can move to quash it, they can object to it, they can refuse to provide the information. But you can sit down on day one after filing a civil case and send out 40 subpoenas to everyone and their sister and just wait and see what everybody says. Um, and because of that, lawyers in civil cases and parties in civil cases have a tremendous amount of power. And if they have the money to pay their lawyers to use it, they will try to get everything from everywhere. You can get everything from phone records to emails to recordings to documents in the basement to, I mean, you can get anything that you can think of. You can try. You might not get it, but you can try. And again, you don't need anybody's approval. But the thing that's confusing, I think. I got a hair. Ever get a hair on your lip and you can feel it, but you can't get it off. Anyway, most of this stuff doesn't happen on the docket. Discovery in most jurisdictions does not have to be filed. You don't have to put it, because there's nothing for the judge to do with it. You don't need the judge to see that you sent a subpoena to ATT. You don't need a judge to see that you sent written questions to the defendant. That's none of the judge's business. The only reason it needs to show up on the docket is if there's a dispute. If someone's like, well, I'm not answering that. Well, I'm not giving you that. I object to that. I'm not giving those records. That's the stuff that shows up on the docket. And it is very normal. Now, this is a place where I think the media can kind of come in and they, you know, because civil cases take so long, when there's any action, they jump on it, like so-and-so has filed a motion to compel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And most of the time it's just really normal stuff, right? You ask for something that nobody wants to give. The person you ask for it from is like, I don't want to give you that. Let's go to the court and see what the judge says. Um, but again, that can sometimes be really breathless coverage. Um, but you know, if you're following a case online, if you're like interested in a case, um, you want discovery fights. You want them to hate each other and argue about everything because that's how we see stuff, right? We have no idea what's going on behind the scenes until somebody has to go on the docket and say, we can't work this out amongst ourselves. We're gonna have to have the judge do it. Generally speaking, discovery disputes and decisions don't tell you very much about the case. They tell you about what the parties see as relevant. They tell you about what the parties are trying to get their hands on. So you can sort of see their theory of the case. And it can certainly be an indicator as to what the judge might think about scope, right? So, for example, if somebody sends a subpoena and says, I want all of your text messages for the last 10 years. Um, and the other party's like, uh, no, you can have them for the last two years. Taking that in front of the judge and requiring the judge to decide, is it gonna be 10, is it gonna be two, is it gonna be zero, or is there gonna be something in between, will give you an indication of the scope of time that the judge thinks is relevant. Um, but this is the thing that I think is critically important. No discovery dispute in a civil case is an indication of who's gonna win the case. It's not like a criminal case where like you file a motion to suppress evidence, or you've got a Brady issue where the prosecution potentially didn't hand over constitutionally required evidence. And if somebody is found to have done something improper, the whole case falls apart. It doesn't work like that in civil cases. You can win every single discovery dispute and lose your ass in the case. Ask Blake Lively. It is a good insight into what the judge might be thinking is relevant and important. And I like watching the disputes because you see the parties kind of have to argue their theory of the case in doing, well, here's why I need 10 years worth of text messages, just because 10 years ago they started discussing blah, blah, blah, blah, right. But I it's it's covered like horse race coverages in politics, right? Like, what are the polls today? Up, down, up. It doesn't tell you who's gonna win. And I think it's interesting, and I really like covering discovery, but I always have to remind people that like this is not, it's not like whoever wins the most discovery fights wins the case by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I talked about this a lot during Lively. Sometimes judges will give parties more discovery if they think they have a weaker case. Like, your case kind of sucks. So, all right, you can have some more stuff because I think in the end, you're probably not gonna find it. Um, the judges are dealing with appellate uh questions, right? Like, do they have the right to have this? If they have the right to have it, I'm gonna err on the side of discovery. In most jurisdictions, the rules of civil procedure say that discovery should be broad. If something is even marginally relevant, let somebody have it, right? Um, the other thing you need to know is that when a discovery dispute shows up on a docket that we can see, like shows up on a court docket, the parties have already had to talk to each other to try to work it out. Every single jurisdiction at this point in 2026 requires, before you can bring a discovery dispute to a judge, that you try to work it out amongst yourselves and that you certify that you have done so, because judges are so busy. They don't want to hear your bullshit. And by the way, that's the other thing. Judges hate dealing with discovery disputes. And so when you bring one to them, sometimes they'll delay it, they get annoyed, sometimes they want to have a hearing, sometimes they don't. And oftentimes, orders on discovery disputes are dripping with resentment and annoyance because the judges are annoyed. It's like, why can't you guys all get together? Why can't the lawyers all get together and figure out how to resolve this? Why you gotta ruin my day with it? The other thing to just keep in mind about discovery disputes is that the vast majority of them are not immediately appealable because they're not final decisions on anything. And so if you lose one, you kind of just gotta move on. There's a lot of coverage in celebrity disputes in particular, I've noticed, about um, you know, somebody asks for discovery, the party receiving it doesn't want to give it. And then you'll see this um coverage in headlines about so-and-so is trying to hide these documents or the this testimony, right? They don't want to give it. They're what are they hiding? What are they hiding? Um, and sometimes people are hiding things, like that, that does happen. But the majority of the time when a discovery request is made and the person to whom it is made doesn't want to answer it, it's because their lawyers doing their job. There are limitations to what can be argued, to what is relevant. There are protections and privileges and privacy statutes and all kinds of stuff. And so usually it's not necessarily because it's the silver bullet. And if you see these two pages, the whole case is gonna blow up. It's usually just the lawyers doing their job and saying, like, I don't want to open the door to a whole new set of documents. You're not entitled to this. Fight me on it. So again, when you're seeing that coverage and the coverage is so-and-so is hiding something, it is intended to make you think they must be hiding the thing. But my experience is that the things that are silver bullets, the things that actually win cases, people don't fight over because it strice and affects you. You wouldn't have a big discovery dispute over an email amongst 500 emails that's the one that loses you the case. You would give them all 500 emails and you would cross your fingers that nobody found it in the stack that you gave them. So that's just the kind of grain of salt you have to take with that stuff. You also, when someone is sending you discovery, it is based on their narrative of the case. Right? I want these documents because my claim is that this happened. Well, if you disagree with them that this happened, then they're not entitled to the documents. So again, you know, the the coverage about it is sort of filling gaps, um, finding headlines to make when all that much is not really going on. But you got to take it all in context because a lot of times it isn't what it seems to be. Which leads to the next point, and that is settlement discussions. Civil cases, just like criminal cases, can be resolved at any time. In criminal cases, it is called a plea bargain. In civil cases, it's a settlement. In civil cases, settlement discussions are mandated by the courts. You have to try to settle. It's required. Again, because judges are busy and trial dockets are busy, and we're not talking about anybody's freedom here. We're just talking about money. So you guys are going to try. Now the parties can decide when they do it and how they do it and with whom. I've had situations where we had mediations before the case was ever filed. We have this dispute, we'll go to law, we'll go to court if we have to, but why don't we see if we can sit in a room with a mediator for a couple of hours and work this out amongst ourselves and save everybody the time and the cost? And sometimes that works. Sometimes parties are willing to get together and talk about settlement really early in a case because they don't want to go to discovery because of cost or they don't want to be under oath or whatever those decisions might be. Usually there's conversations happening all throughout the case on some level, even if they're not that serious. You know, usually, even if you're litigating a case and we're seeing all these things on the docket, at some point, you know, the lawyers for the two sides walking out to their cars after. One of the depositions, one of them turns to the other and says, How much is it going to take for this thing to go away? I don't want to do this case. Those conversations are going on all of the time. But even if they are, before you can set foot in a courtroom to have a trial in a civil matter in the United States, you're going to have to have a formal mediation. You're going to have to have a third-party mediator who is uninterested and impartial sit down with the parties and see if they can resolve it. It's not something that you just do if you want to. You can do more of it if you want to. You can do it earlier if you want to. You can do it in a way that works better for you, but you're going to have to do it. And this is also critical. So again, these headlines of, oh, there was a mediation, oh, there was a settlement. Yeah, whatever. Everyone does that. You have to. It's required. The other thing to know about that is that conversations and particularly offers that are made at mediations and settlement conferences are highly, highly confidential. Lawyers, clients, mediators all sign non-disclosure agreements that they will not discuss anything that happened in that room. And all of that, by the way, is inadmissible as evidence in any court. And that's because if people could go and talk about it, nobody would tell the truth, right? There needs to be a room where you can say, you know what, Bob, I think I probably would take 250,000. You have to be able to do that to get it resolved. So when you see stories or posts where people are like, I have inside info about blah, blah, blah, be very skeptical. Be very skeptical. Because that would be a violation of the highest order for someone to leak stuff that happened in a settlement conference. Now, in terms of the evidence, remember what I said earlier on about, you know, you'll have a complaint that'll sometimes have stuff attached to it that is potential evidence. It's okay to call it potential evidence, but it's not evidence yet. In a civil case, you don't even start talking about whether evidence that's been gathered is admissible, like meets the evidence code admissibility, until after discovery is completely over. You don't even start having that discussion. There might be a mention in a discovery dispute that you're only allowed to discover things that are potential evidence. But you don't get into admissibility until you are completely done with discovery. A lot of cases are over by then. In a criminal case, if you're the defendant and the defendant's lawyer, you can start filing motions to suppress the evidence right away. You can't do that in a civil case. You have to get all the discovery, you have to get to the next phase, which is like the pretrial phase, and then you can start arguing over whether evidence is admissible. And the reason that matters is because if you are seeing coverage, you're seeing information about a particular case and what kind of discovery or evidence has been obtained. There is no guarantee that that stuff is admissible in court. Just because it's been discovered doesn't mean that it's admissible. Admissibility requires relevance, but it also requires reliability. It requires authentication and foundation. And it could be hearsay and it could be duplicative, and it could be all kinds of things that aren't admissible. So you can look at it and be like, okay, here's the information that we have, and that shapes what I think about the case, but it is no guarantee that it's ever going to get in front of court anywhere, not in any formal way. Another thing that uh breathless coverage all the time uh is a trial date being set. Um, you know, blah blah blah, Jane and Jack are going to trial on yada yaddy date. I get it. I get why it's exciting to people to think that there's a trial date, but I'm here to um give you some unfortunate news. One, putting something on a trial docket for a trial date is an administrative like click of a computer automatic thing. There's really no strategy behind an initial trial date in most places. Because again, remember, you don't have speedy trial, you don't have any of that. It's based on when the judge who's assigned to the case is available. And they put you on a trial docket. And the reason that they put you on a trial docket early is because all of the deadlines that are coming up, you work backward from the trial date. So if you say, okay, the trial date is on December 31st, that means that pretrial motions are going to be filed by December 1st. And that means that motions in Lemony are going to be filed by November 28th. And that means that discovery is going to be over by October 3rd, right? So you back it up from that date. But the purpose of putting that trial date out there is not necessarily for the trial to occur on that date. It doesn't mean that any of the parties agreed to that date. Most of the time they don't. Unless you're in a small court somewhere or some specialized court where the judge actually gives a shit if the trial date works for you. Most of the time it's like, here's your trial date. Doesn't mean anybody agreed. It doesn't mean that the judge has determined anything about the merits of the case, about whether it's going forward, about whether it's a good case or a bad case. Like it means literally nothing. It is a calendaring exercise. Um, and most importantly, it doesn't mean that that's the trial date. Most of the time, trial dates move because life. Also, because in many courts and any remotely busy jurisdiction, you'll have a trial docket for a particular date and there's 10 or 15 cases on it. It's not just one, unless you're a really special high-profile case and they're gonna give you the docket. But for a regular schmegular case, you're gonna be on a trial docket along with a whole bunch of other people. And the reason they can do that is because most of those cases are going to settle, which I'm gonna talk about here in a second. So when you see something like trial, you know, so-and-so has been scheduled, Jane and Jack have been scheduled for trial, whatever, that means that they now have a scheduling and calendaring order so we know what all the deadlines are. That doesn't mean that's when it's going to trial. Don't book any hotel rooms yet. Now, one of the things I think is critical when you get into discovery and you get into talking about the stuff that's happening later in the case that's really different from a civil case, I mean from a criminal case, is that the plaintiff and the defendant are basically on equal footing. Now, the plaintiff does have the burden of proof, but the burden of proof is preponderance of the evidence, which is like just over 50%. In a criminal case, there's the power of the government versus the defendant. That's why you have all these constitutional protections, right? Because the power dynamic is off, because the state and the government have so much power and the defendant has so little. In a civil case, for the most part, the plaintiff and the defendant are on equal footing and they're treated the same. No one has any more power than anybody else. If the plaintiff wants to get information, they have to go out and get it or hire an investigator or do the work, same as the defendant, right? Because these are just private citizens. In terms of the clients in a civil case, the clients are not required to be at anything other than their own deposition, if one is taken, and a mediation if one occurs. They are not required to go to court, they are not required to make appearances in court, they are not required to speak to anybody other than responding to discovery and engaging in settlement negotiations. If a case is going to settle, the client is the one who makes the ultimate decision, which is why they have to be at a settlement conference or mediation. But you will very oftentimes not see a client, either the plaintiff or the defendant, in a civil case, unless and until there's actually a trial, because there's no need for it. I should have been counting these breathless coverage, fake breathless coverage. Maybe this is number five, something like that, is pro hoc vice admissions. So lawyers are members of bars. They are admitted to a bar by state, right? So you're admitted to South Carolina, Texas, and Missouri. Um, federal courts are each court is its own bar. So the Middle District of California is one bar, and the uh Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal above that is its own bar, and the Supreme Court of the United States is another bar. The point is that there are a lot of attorneys, particularly big-time people, who are barred in one place, but they practice in lots of other states. You're not going to go out and take a bar just to represent somebody in one state because you don't have to, because you can do something called pro hoc vice. And pro hoc vice means for the case. So in most jurisdictions and in all of the federal courts, if you're a lawyer who is not a member of that court, but you want to represent a client in that court, you file a motion for pro hoc vice, and you generally have to pay a fee, show that you are a member of good standing in whatever bar you are a member of, in whatever state you're in, and you have to attest that you will follow the rules of the court that you're in. And you are usually required to have local counsel. You associate with a lawyer who is a member of that court, and they can make sure that you that you color within the lines and that you understand all of the rules. It's very common, it happens all of the time. But I see sometimes coverage of like so-and-so was asked to be admitted to this court, like it's this huge deal. And it's like, well, they have to. If you want to be able to either sign your name to something that's going to get filed on the docket or speak to the judge in a hearing, you have to be admitted to that court to do it. You don't have to be admitted to that court to just sit in the background and draft motions. But if you want to actually make arguments and advocate for a client, you have to do that. So a lot of times these big time, like for example, what happened in Lively is Brian Friedman is a California lawyer. He's not barred in the Southern District of New York. So he filed a motion for pro hawk VJ. He pro hawked into New York, and Mitch Schuster and Kevin Fritz were his local counsel, and they made sure that he understood SDNY and SDNY's rules. It happens all the time. So it can be telling because if you're bringing someone from out of state to be a lawyer in a case, that can tell you that either this is a really big case and they're willing to bring in somebody from outside who's gonna have to pay to travel, or this might be their regular lawyer, right? That they want to be a part of the case. But in terms of like legally somebody being admitted, it's not a big deal, like at all. To wrap up, I want to say this. Civil cases and litigating civil cases, you are always acting as if you're going to trial while knowing that you probably won't. Because most civil cases, 98% of civil cases, are going to settle before they go to trial. Because you're just arguing over money, and so they're easily resolved by money. What that means though is that litigating civil cases is largely about getting leverage over your opposing parties to get them to the settlement table and to settle for what you want them to. So if you're the one who has brought the case, if you're the plaintiff, and let's say you've sued for $100 million, what you want to be doing while the case is going on is getting the discovery that you want, right? Making it expensive for them, making it hard for them so that they are more willing to come to the table and say, you know what, I'll give you $50 million if this whole thing will just go away. If you're the defendant, you're thinking the opposite. Your job is I've been sued for $100 million. I'd be willing to pay them $25, but not a dollar over $25. So what I have to do is make my case look as strong, make their case look as weak as possible. File a motion to dismiss and get a couple of claims clipped off. Get a couple of people to give depositions that don't match with the plaintiff's theory of the case. So they'll be like, okay, maybe we can't win $100 million. Maybe we ought to take 25. And because so much in civil cases is strategic, you oftentimes can't tell as a member of the public what matters and what doesn't. I think that's what makes it hard. And I think that's been something that I've really enjoyed being able to give people the inside information on. For example, um, in a civil case, if you have the money, you take everybody's deposition, everyone and their sister. Not just the parties, but the corporate reps and the person who was there once. And, you know, you get, let's say, a medical malpractice case, you open up the file and you see everyone who's ever written in that person's chart, and every single one of them gets deposed. That doesn't mean that any of those depositions are ever going to lead to anything that matters. Because in the civil case, you don't have to be a sort of a scalpel that way, at least not if somebody's willing to pay your bills, which is what's happening in these high-profile cases. You can take 70 depositions in a case and in the end use five. Because in a civil case, the discovery truly is discovery. It is finding out what happened and what evidence there might be of that, and then figuring out how that makes your case better or worse. Um keep your eye out for that. Keep your eye out for the headlines. Hopefully, this is helpful. Um, I'm gonna pin it to uh a couple of my pages, so it's the first thing that's there. But if you're ever like watching a high-profile civil case, or you're even watching my content, you're like, I don't remember that, refer back to this. Um, I really try to make content that takes you behind the scenes. I really try to make content that explains what I think is happening here. It was very validating to hear from Kevin Fritz that um when I was covering uh the Baldoney matter, that I think he said 85% of the time that I said this is what's going on behind the scenes. I was right. That's pretty good. I'll take it. But you have to account for that other 15%, that as good as my content might be and as good as I can guess, only the parties actually know what's happening. So that's also some content to watch out for is people telling you that they absolutely know for certain because they don't. Um, we've also learned over time that the docket can be used for public relations. Um, not everything that gets filed is actually for the judge's eyes, particularly if it's a public docket. Um, so keep your eye out for anything and just if it looks like PR and smells like PR, it's probably PR. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Civil cases can be long and they can be complicated, but there's good news. And the good news is that I'm here and I'll be back here next week with Frank snoring in the background because the drama never stops, and someone has to make it make sense.