Local Lawyer Oblivious to Unduly Burdensome and Overly Broad

It is well known around Wheeling, West Virginia that defense attorney Martin Glasscart will fight each and every one of his cases to the bitter end. Consistent with this practice, Mr. Glasscart’s favorite defense tactic is to slow down an inevitable loss through discovery and the more confusing he makes his interrogatories or his discovery responses the better.

In one particularly confounding request, Glasscart asked for all documents, things, objects, clothing, thoughts, notes, words, furniture, or televisions shows that would either prove or disprove or could have the propensity to prove something that could or could not potentially, if all the right factors were in place, depending on the angle or perspective of the documents, things, objects, clothing, thoughts, notes, words, furniture or television shows referenced, as defined in the definitions section of defendant’s first set of interrogatories, caused or could have caused plaintiff to have understood, or thought to have understood without reference to knowledge or intuition but strictly relating to common sense, or the sub-senses contained therein, to contribute to the injuries alleged or implied in the words, deeds, actions, or other elements associated with the present complaint.

Glasscart also typically drafts interrogatories by suspending Word’s automatic paragraph numbering function in order to intersperse misplaced paragraphs and utilize an indecipherable method for labeling sub-, subsub-, and subsubsubparagraphs. This allows him to intersperse a second Interrogatory 7 after Interrogatory 12(A)(b)(i)(2).

Glasscart’s answers to discovery are no better. His most often-used phrases in response to interrogatories are “finders keepers, losers weepers,” “let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill” and “wouldn’t you like to know.” An informal survey of Mr. Glasscart’s adversaries did uncover that he normally buckles once a motion to compel is threatened, but that will often only come after weeks and months of letter writing and meet and confers have taken place.

“The way I see it,” responded a triumphant Glasscart in response to an inquiry from Litination, “the extra cost that my opponent pumps into dealing with discovery puts my clients one step closer to a reasonable settlement….or in other words, don’t hate the player, hate the game.”