Lying lawyer loses lawsuit. Let’s look.

Early in my career, I learned that it’s bad form for a lawyer to accuse another party of having “lied.” Judges generally frown upon this.

So, you can imagine that my interest was piqued when I read an Eighth Circuit decision issued yesterday weighing “the appropriate sanction for a plaintiff who lied in a deposition and withheld information.”

But this wasn’t just any plaintiff. She was the former in-house counsel at a Fortune 100 company who claimed that retaliation motivated the company to end her employment.

“Her retaliation claim would have gone to a jury,” wrote the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. That is, “if she had not spent more than a year and a half misleading [the defendant] and the district court about her employment.”

And “misleading” is being kind.

The “deception,” as the Eighth Circuit later described it, began at her deposition, when the plaintiff claimed to be “currently employed” at one company but “had already accepted a much higher-paying job elsewhere.”

Rather than “correct the inaccuracy…she doubled down on the deception,” wrote the Eighth Circuit.

“Several months after the deposition, long after she had started working at the other company, she submitted a declaration, along with a copy of her résumé, to the district court,” in which she listed herself as Associate General Counsel from February 2021 to the “present” at the lower paying job.

Presumably, the plaintiff did this to inflate her wage loss. Indeed, in settlement communications, the plaintiff used the same lower-paying job as the benchmark from which she calculated her damages.

It wasn’t until the weeks leading up to trial that the defendant learned the truth when it received a copy of the plaintiff’s W-2 and a signed employment agreement with the higher-paying employer.

The plaintiff tried to discredit her own lawyers by accusing them of “advising her” to lie. But neither the lower court nor the Eighth Circuit was having any of it. The lower court dismissed the retaliation claim as a sanction and awarded the defendant almost $100K in attorney’s fees. The Eighth Circuit affirmed, most notably because the plaintiff, a lawyer, never took the opportunity to correct the record.

And “even if her attorneys played a role in convincing her to lie,” wrote the appellate court, “her only ‘recourse’ is pursuing an action against them, not asking us to forgive her misconduct in this case.”

Dismissal and sanctions seem harsh. But, according to the courts, “anything less than dismissal would provide no more than a slap on the wrist given the gravity, duration, and nature of the misconduct.”

That goes for lawyer-litigants too.