No, Love Lost as Fourth District, Division One Reverses JNOV Disfavorable to Initially Losing Litigant, Who Won a Jury Verdict, Was Then Overturned Post-trial, and Was Vindicated on Appeal.
This one caught our attention because of the appellate court’s rather subdued characterization of it being a “somewhat unusual case.” Wow! This is one unusual case in our view, but we will let you be the judges.
Rogozienski v. Love, Case No. D056857 (4th Dist., Div. 1 Oct. 5, 2011) (unpublished) involved an underlying dissolution proceeding where husband and wife agreed to have the matter heard by a family law practitioner sitting as a pro tem judge. (Respondent Love was wife’s attorney, and Appellant Rogozienski was the husband.) After pro tem judge entered a judgment decidedly adverse to husband’s interest after a three-phase trial, husband discovered that pro tem judge had a conflict–while the dissolution action was pending, Love transferred his interest in a vacation home to a third party, which then transferred the interest to pro tem judge. Once husband obtained discovery of this transaction and made a fuss about it, the pro tem judge withdrew from the case and his rulings were vacated in entirety after further trial and appellate court proceedings.
Husband then sued both pro tem judge and Love (wife’s attorney) for civil damages, mainly claiming as damages the attorney’s fees he incurred in the first round of litigation due to Love’s conduct after previous proceedings resulted in a consensus that the pro tem judge had judicial immunity. Husband’s case proceeded to a jury trial where he won $780,482 in damages against Love. However, Love won a JNOV on the theory that husband did not prove that the gift was the real legal cause of his lost litigation expenses.
The Fourth District, Division 1 reversed and reinstated the jury’s verdict. Although basic equities did pervade the appellate court’s decision, it did not buy the argument that the gift of the home was not instrumental in husband’s targeted loss and that other attacks would have necessarily resulted in vacating of the pro tem judge’s rulings.
BLOG UNDERVIEW–Although not referenced in the decision, we did some public searches because this dispute did catch our attention. The California State Bar filed a Notice of Disciplinary Charges against both the pro tem judge and Mr. Love, both of whom responded in 2007 to the Bar charges. The latest we could find was that a status conference in the matter was scheduled for January 18, 2011; otherwise, nothing else to report.