Cordero v. Olson Assocs. P.C., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 91994, 2025 WL1383217 (D. Utah May 13, 2025), is just another FDCA case. Except it is not the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that is in controversy, but, rather, the Fair Debt Collection Act. The plaintiff sued several defendants, including law firms, for allegedly unlawful debt collection practices. She claimed that those debt collection practices caused emotional distress and physical injuries. 

So what is a debt collection case doing on the DDL Blog?  We owe an explanation. 

Cordero ends up being interesting for how the court (a magistrate judge) handled the plaintiff’s lawyer, who seems to have been something of a “Rambo litigator” — and most of you have had the misfortune of encountering representatives of that unpleasant species. To be fair, this was a Rambo in the sense of words, not deeds.  As far as we know, the lawyer did not do last minute document dumps or commit fraud or anything like that.  Instead, it appears that the lawyer hurled a lot of useless, silly invectives.  But after a certain point, name-calling can be irksome enough to move a court to action. 

At issue in this decision were the plaintiff’s medical records and various disputes related to her deposition topics and location.  The plaintiff filed a motion for a protective order and the defendants filed competing motions to open up certain avenues of discovery. The plaintiff wanted to prevent sharing of her records among the defendant law firms. She also wanted to limit questioning about her medical or financial condition that she deemed irrelevant or overly intrusive.  This type of skirmishing is typical in American litigation, and the issues are seldom novel or intriguing. The plaintiff won a couple of her arguments, and lost a few more. 

But Cordero highlighted a couple of points that are either instructive or at least a source of solid schadenfreude. 

First, on substance, the defendant was entitled to take the plaintiff’s deposition in person at the offices of defense counsel.  It was the plaintiff, after all, who brought the suit. She was obviously a key witness. Her injury claims placed her credibility at the center of the case. The plaintiff resisted a personal appearance at the defense law firm on grounds of inconvenience and burden, but these arguments did not impress the court. The noticer of a deposition chooses the location, and the default form of deposition remains in-person, face to face.  The plaintiff could not force the defendants to take a remote deposition. 

If any of this arrives as a surprise to you, count yourself instructed. You’re welcome.  

Now for the moment of schadenfreude. The court admonished plaintiff’s counsel on “professionalism” for the purple prose he deployed in his briefs, which the court considered to be a series of personal attacks on opposing counsel.  The plaintiff’s briefing characterized defense arguments as being “disingenuous,” “nonsense,” “meaningless,” “callous,” “intellectually dishonest,” “baseless,” “blatantly untrue,” etc. etc.  You get the idea. It appears that the plaintiff briefing devoted as much ink to impugning the other side’s motives as to addressing the logic of the arguments.  That is not a good or smart. When we edit a brief and see this sort of thing (the word “disingenuous” is always a giveaway) we wince, and then we delete. Heat is a poor substitute for light. 

(We can recall with precision the first time we encountered the word “disingenuous.” We were in an undergraduate course on the history of the Supreme Court. The teacher was Archibald Cox. One session was devoted to FDR’s 1937 court-packing plan. SCOTUS had invalidated several New Deal initiatives. FDR’s purported rationale for adding Justices to the Court had nothing to do with the High Court’s rulings. Instead, FDR expressed concern that SCOTUS was filled with “aged or infirm Justices.” The plan failed. Critics called FDR’s stated reason “disingenuous.” The word means dishonest — an innocent-sounding cover for something devious.)

In Cordero, the court expressed displeasure with the plaintiff lawyer’s “hostile, discourteous, and uncivil” conduct.  Such judicial disappointment would hurt enough. But the Cordero court went as far as imposing a sanction against the plaintiff counsel, apparently sua sponte. (From the opinion we learn that the plaintiff lawyer asked for sanctions against the defense, but we read nothing about the defense asking for sanctions.  How’s that for comeuppance?) The court ordered the plaintiff lawyer to read the Utah Standards of Professionalism, certify to having done so, and certify that he will comply with those standards “in both letter and spirit.”  The court clearly had enough, and warned of further sanctions and referral to the disciplinary board for any future unprofessional conduct.  

It is probably a good thing for judges to take actions against lawyers who make the occupation more nasty than it needs to be. But while we used the word schadenfreude to signal our approval of the Cordero decision, we did so fully aware that poison pens exist on both sides of the v.  (Yes, maybe even occasionally on this blog. Yes, mostly the author of this post.  Yes, we grieve over this fact during dark evenings of the soul.) We defense hacks can do better. And that is not mere moralizing. Judges hate it when lawyers challenge the honesty of their opponents. (A couple of weeks ago, Justice Gorsuch dressed down perhaps the finest current SCOTUS advocate during oral argument for labeling her “friends on the other side” as liars.) The best way to get sanctions against the other side is to make sure that your own side does not stray into incivility. Make the contrast clear for the court. Tamp down the name-calling, avoid ad hominem attacks, and clobber the other side on the facts and law.