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Do a JoB—Harvey tHe litiGator
gain with the ADA. (I knew: Assistant District Attorney). What can I bargain for? An ACD. (This I didn’t know: ACD stands for adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which was a procedure presumably invented for first-time, probably middle-class, offenders in small-time criminal trouble. If you ACD’d and stayed out of trouble for, say, six months, the arrest record would be expunged.)
Perfect advice all around: no embarrassment, followed by a state- ment to the court that we will wish to have an adjournment so as to be enabled to brief a motion to dismiss on the grounds of entrapment. I was granted two weeks, but better, after I was granted an adjournment for two weeks, I was approached, not by the ADA but by a very pretty woman in blue. Our arresting officer, now in her uniform, there to tes- tify if necessary, was quite attractive (which might have helped the entrapment argument)—one might say arresting—but that’s not the point. It was she, not the ADA, who offered an ACD. I grabbed it and went back to the firm a minor hero, even in Walpin’s less-than-gracious eyes.
And that marked the last time that I actually spoke to a judge on the record. The remainder of my three-year career as a litigator consisted of apprentice work of the type referred to at the start of this section. Oddly enough, matters that I worked on when I was in the Litigation Depart- ment comprised some of the most important of my career, and, as will be seen, some of them led, indirectly and directly, to my career in real estate.
Just in Case(s)
As promised (threatened?), I will follow with a catalog of the cases from my litigation days that still stand out after all of these years. Now, I know that a catalog of cases sounds like a very boring thing, especially for those of you who have no interest in things legal, but if you bear with me, you will see that I recall the matters described below for reasons that do not always have to do with the law per se. Sometimes the client
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