Donheff and Laurence, both your experiences are unpleasantly familiar.
As the manager of a printing operation, I had terminated the employment of an individual who sought redress through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When that failed, he filed suit against both the company and me individually. (One interesting side note: during the EEOC hearing in downtown Dallas, the building fire alarm went off. We evacuated and re-convened the hearing, gathered in a circle on the sidewalk.)
Although my company hired a law firm to defend “us”, I was never entirely comfortable with the arrangement. Especially when it went to trial and we gathered in the courtroom of
Judge Harold “Barefoot” Sanders at the Earl Cabell Federal Building. As things were just getting started, the plaintiff’s attorney asked Judge Sanders to sever me as a defendant and prohibit the company from reimbursing me in any way for any judgment against me in the lawsuit. I soiled my pants fainted hyperventilated was not amused.
Judge Saunders asked the attorneys for both sides and the plaintiff to join him in his chambers. I was not invited to attend, so I sat alone at the table and waited. As the minutes dragged by I began to notice an unpleasant odor in the room. I looked back at the spectator section of the courtroom to see a growing audience of what appeared to be street people. As it was August and we were in Texas, they were, uh…”ripe”. I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on, but I later learned they were ‘protesters’ in town for the 1984 Republican Convention. They had been camped out for several days under a downtown bridge and were
seeking an injunction against the City of Dallas to move their protest area closer to the convention delegates. They had been granted a hearing by Judge Sanders immediately following the outcome of my lawsuit.
After what seemed an eternity but was actually less than an hour, everyone returned. Judge Sanders had denied their motion to sever me as a defendant and had convinced the plaintiff it would be wise to accept the (token 4 figure) offer we had placed on the table months prior, just to get him to go away.
It was an "interesting" experience.