Legal Ethics

Partner Catches Heat For Turning Deposition Into Group Project

It's just one little mistake! Done repeatedly. In a small time period.

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Law school is known for teaching you how to think like a lawyer. The bar exam is advertised as testing for minimal competency. At Above the Law, we like to show that those things aren’t always enough. Take Jeffrey Rosin, for example, the managing partner of O’Hagan Meyer’s Boston office who thought it was a good idea to coach his client during a Zoom deposition. And he did it more than once.

During the fifth hour of the deposition, the opposing counsel overheard Rosin provide an answer to his client and confronted Rosin. Rosin “rebuffed the allegation and the deposition continued,” Talwani said. After the deposition, the opposing counsel reviewed the video recording and identified more than 50 instances where he could hear Rosin “surreptitiously provide” an answer to his client, who repeated the same answer.

That’s not a typo. Over 50. 5th D. Fifty times, while being recorded, and getting called out for it at one point. Unsurprisingly, he is at risk of being sanctioned for his behavior. While he did not deny what he did or that it was wrong, he did describe it as a “substantial lapse of judgment” and is asking for a bit of grace.

…Is that what we’re calling blatant disregard for rules and decorum now? Because there are a couple substantial lapses of judgment — that may or may not be tax-related — that I’d love to get to work on.

I can understand an absent-minded mistake or refreshing someone’s memory out of turn, but this is something most people would get kicked out of trial team for as students. If you’d like to follow up on this during your lunch break, be on the look out for In re: Jeffrey Rosin. Try to keep your substantial lapses of judgment (SLJs) under wraps till then.

Lawyer accused of feeding answers to his client in Zoom deposition faces possible sanction [ABA Journal]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen name Knehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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