The Defendant in this case was a well known (and ground-breaking) legal malpractice attorney who has been in a swirl of late career litigation.  There have been RICO cases, there have been intra-office blow-ups, and herein this case he was sued for legal malpractice.  However, here, all went wrong for plaintiff.

In Callaghan v Curtis ; 2011 NY Slip Op 01786 ; Decided on March 8, 2011 ; Appellate Division, Second Department we see a case dismissed, basically on an attorney’s misbehavior at a deposition.

Speaking objections were once the realm of a truly experienced attorney.  That attorney, defending a deposition, would object in a way that either re-phrased the questions, totally confused the record, allowed the witness to infer a better answer (rather than tell the client how to answer) and in general, made the transcript utterly ineffective for trial.  But all that is changing.

Here, plaintiff is non-suited because of the deposition.  "[A] trial court is given broad discretion to oversee the discovery process" (Castillo v Henry Schein, Inc., 259 AD2d 651, 652). Here, the plaintiff clearly violated a prior order of the Supreme Court by failing to bring certain documents to her deposition. Her attorney also made extensive "speaking objections" during the deposition, and the plaintiff herself repeatedly refused to answer clear questions. We conclude that the Supreme Court providently exercised its discretion, upon the defendants’ motion pursuant to CPLR 3126 to strike her reply to their counterclaims, by, inter alia, precluding the plaintiff from offering any documents at trial (see e.g. O’Neill v Ho, 28 AD3d 626, 627). "