Flea and the plaintiff’s attorney

Eric Turkewitz calls up the plaintiff’s attorney and gets some answers on legal strategy:

So I called plaintiff’s counsel, Elizabeth Mulvey, of Crowe & Mulvey to find out. She told me she was tipped off to his blog by another attorney. How did the other attorney know? Because Flea had blogged about a subject that Mulvey had spoken on some time back and the other attorney realized that she had the case. Flea had unwittingly given out the identifying information when he discussed her talk. On this cached version of Flea’s site, you can see his comments discussing Mulvey on April 28th.

With that information in hand Mulvey scoured his blog for helpful information, much the way any attorney would review writings produced by a witness for the other side. She found a post where Flea referred to Nelson’s Pediatrics as the bible of pediatrics. (I have the 11th ed. from 1979 on my own bookshelf.) So she asked him on the witness stand if he considered Nelson’s the bible for pediatrics. He said no. Lawyers call that a “prior inconsistent statement” that allows us to confront the witness with the other statement. That meant asking him if he was Flea and confronting him with the blog posting.

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