PODCAST #426 WITH RACHEL JUAREZ TRANSCRIPT
You are listening to the Reality Steve podcast with your host, Reality Steve. He’s got all the latest info and behind the scenes juice on Grant’s upcoming season of The Bachelor and interviewing some of your favorite reality stars. Now here’s Reality Steve.
What’s up, everybody. Welcome to podcast number 426. I’m your host reality. Steve, thank you all for tuning in a great, great episode for you today. We’re talking to Rachel Juarez from Hot Bench. I did this on my YouTube live yesterday. So this is the audio version of that in case you couldn’t catch it yesterday.
You can now catch it on my YouTube channel. It’s up there. Also reality, Steve 24, or you’re listening to it here and just the audio version, but an absolutely fabulous conversation with Rachel Juarez. And we will get to all that momentarily. I do want to say today’s another great day for you listeners because on the daily roundup.
I gave out your episode by episode spoilers for Grant’s season, including his winner. Now, I do not have it in written form yet. I have it all written out in my notes. That’s pretty much what I was reading when I did the podcast, but I need to format it correctly to have it up on my website. So my guess is at the latest it’ll be up on Tuesday.
So you can listen to it verbally. I think most of you just want to know who won and you don’t have to wait very long in the podcast today to, to know who won. I do that at the beginning and then we go through all the episodes and all the eliminations. I don’t have every single date but I do have most of them and I do have all your eliminations.
So that’s the main thing I think you want to know is who goes home one episode, what’s the drama. I fill in some of the drama as well and the reasonings behind it. So that is all up on your daily roundup today. In case you missed it, Rachel Juarez is also coming to the fan appreciation party. Right now the fan appreciation party is sold out.
I have no more spots left. There is a chance that I’m going to have spots and be able to get more spots to this party. But as of right now, I don’t. So I don’t want to promise anything. I don’t want to guarantee anything. So I know a lot of you have emailed me in the last couple of days after hearing it is sold out saying you want to be on the waiting list.
I have all your emails. I responded to all of you and said, I’m saving your email, but I can’t guarantee anything. I don’t know. We’ll have to see. So right now I’m sold out, but if I have openings that happen or I am allowed to get more people into the party, by all means, we’ll do that and I will let you know about that, but we’re in a waiting pattern right now.
We got plenty of time. The party’s not till May 31st, so we’ve got plenty of time for that. I will let you know as soon as I can, if more spots are available. But I did want to say Rachel is going to be at the party as well as Dave Neal as well as Courtney Robertson as Well as she’s all batch Stephanie and Jackie.
They’re all gonna be there. It is an 80s themed party So I would appreciate it if you dressed up in your best 80s Garb, there is going to be a costume contest where prizes will be given out We have a raffle like we do every year, but I am gonna add a costume contest we are gonna have a live show that night at the House of Blues in Mandalay Bay and And Show’s going to last around an hour, maybe an hour and a half.
There is going to be a photo booth. They’re probably going to be a DJ. This is, this is the biggest one because it’s also the night of my 50th birthday. So let’s celebrate in style. You only turn 50 once. So that’s why I’m going big this year on the party. I’m telling you right now, next year’s party, probably going back to Venetian and probably going back down to a hundred people max, and it’s going to be the same first come first serve.
So. We’re well, we’re, we’re light years away from that happening. But for right now, don’t have any spots available and I will let you know when I do have spots available, I cannot believe it’s sold out before grant season has even started. So I thank all of you. This is going to be a really good time, but probably gonna be a little hectic.
Anyway, this interview with Rachel is two hours long. So. Maybe you listen at one and a half speed. Maybe you listen at two times speed. I don’t know Sounds a little too chipmunky and especially when Rachel is going over legal things if you have it on two times speed You’re probably gonna maybe not comprehend it as well.
Whatever the case may be I don’t want to waste much more time because this is a two hour interview so Rachel’s great one of my favorite guests really ever in this show All right, let’s get going. Podcast number 426. What’s up, everyone? Welcome in. This is the first live I’ve done in a while. Glad we were able to do it.
Glad we were able to get hot benches Rachel Juarez on. And I wanted to bring her in immediately. First off, I just wanted to kind of add this. We are going to do a Q and A at some point during this. So any help on the super chats, obviously we’ll get your question answered, but any help regardless of helping with the channel, I’d really appreciate it.
All my info is scrolling at the bottom of the screen. So without any further ado, let’s bring her in. It’s Rachel Juarez. Hey, Rachel.
Hi, Steve. How are you?
I’m great. I know that before we get into everything, I know that obviously you’ve kind of been through it these last months. Last week or so you’re in Southern California.
You are dealing with the fires. How has it been for you guys? What have you had to evacuate? What’s your situation?
So we’re fine. We didn’t have to evacuate. We were a few blocks from the evacuation zone, but we ended up leaving town just because of the air quality. So we’ve been very fortunate, very lucky.
My family’s safe. Our house is safe. A lot of people who that’s not the case for. So it’s just as a city, I think as a community, it’s been, it’s been A really devastating time
and I’m a, you know, some people that have lost their property.
Many.
Really?
Yeah. Both. Both in the Altadena area and the Eastern Fire, the Altadena, Pasadena area, and particularly in the Palisades fire.
Mm-hmm . I, I know a lot of families in the Palisades who have lost their homes and. It’s going to be a long path to rebuild. So
no easy transition from that. I’m glad you’re safe and sound. Some good, you know, some, some news to pass on for those that watch Rachel show, maybe you have seen this online deadline had a story.
I think variety had a story about it. There was some news in the, you know, the TV trade papers that hot bench is moving their filming to Connecticut of all places,
you know,
you live in Southern California, so why don’t you update everybody on what’s happening with you and hot bench?
Yeah. So you’re right.
A hot bench is moving. It’s filming to Connecticut, to Stanford studios, which has been a long, you know, a long time hub of a lot of unscripted shows and Although I’m in Southern California and although my family is going to stay in Southern California, I am going to stay with the show and I’m going to commute out and continue to film in Connecticut with Hot Bench.
That’s awesome. When did, when does the next season begin filming? Are you allowed?
Yeah. So right now we are airing season 11, season 12, we’ll begin filming in March or April and and then season 12 will air in the fall.
Gotcha. So that’s, it’s a hell of a commute. It’s not, it’s not down the street. It’s not like you’re going to Arizona or Vegas or Colorado.
And it’ll be interesting. I have little kids, so it’ll be interesting to see how it works out. But. I really love the show. I love the people I work with. And so I’m going to give it a shot.
Yeah. So I can’t, I can’t imagine it’s months at a time that you’re gone from your family. Can you talk about the filming schedule?
Sure. Yeah. So the way we’re going to do it is we film several days at a time. You know, usually about three days at a time and we film anywhere between six and eight cases per day. So the way that it’s going to work is it’s going to be sort of week on week off. for, you know, from about April until about August.
So we’ll film on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then take the next week off and then go back to filming. So I will probably be flying just back and forth. Each week spend a week out there a week back here and it’s only for about five months of the year So that makes it easier as well
So i’m going to say so if you film tuesday wednesday thursday, you would be on a flight back to california I’m assuming friday.
Yeah,
friday to friday probably and then get back the following weekend and Ready to go.
Exactly. Exactly. So I won’t be away from my family for more than a week at a time.
Okay, nice. Okay, let’s get into what we’ve waited for for a while now. You know, when, when David Gingras first dropped the appeal that he filed in this case, I believe it was mid November, right?
Maybe it was it after Thanksgiving or before Thanksgiving. I can’t remember. It was November ish.
Yeah, it had to be november ish because the original due date was december 24th So it must have been right around thanksgiving
So it’s right around that time and at the time I said you want to come on and discuss it and you were like Well, not really because it doesn’t what was your explanation for why you didn’t want to discuss it then?
So we did a little bit of discussion We just didn’t kind of go we didn’t kind of dive into it completely because I don’t practice law in arizona And it’s very difficult when you’re reading one side of a brief when you don’t have any independent knowledge of the law In that particular jurisdiction to really evaluate the arguments.
And so I kind of figured instead of me researching from scratch Jingres’s arguments, why don’t I wait until Woodnick’s firm files his brief and see what their arguments in response are. Because that will sort of point me towards the opposing authorities and towards the counter arguments. So that I can then evaluate both sides arguments for myself.
And so you’ve obviously read Gingras appeal, you’ve read Woodnick’s brief, you have clicked on all the cases that were attached to it, you’ve gotten yourself familiar, or not all, maybe, maybe you did do all, I don’t know. Not all
of them, no. Any of them, but not all of them. Some of them were not necessary, they stood for kind of just general propositions of law, so you don’t need to read those.
Okay, so, I do want to say, right off the bat, here, you know, we’re going to be discussing What Gingras said, and then obviously Woodnick’s response and your thoughts on everything. And, you know, this will end up, you know, if you’re not watching this live, it obviously saves to my YouTube channel. You can watch it at any point and any content creators that want to use my video and use your answers.
I will sue your ass in the next week. If
I’m
kidding, use all the video you want. I don’t care about this fair use bullshit. No, I, you know, I understand that actually I don’t understand why he gets so his panties at a lot over this, but we know that’s what he does. I don’t care if you use my whole video.
Honestly,
I
go ahead. But I know that a lot of people will want to listen to your answers and use those as clips and whatnot. I have no problem with that. You can use long and you can use 30 minutes of this video. You could use 40 But what we’re going to do is we’re going to go over it You’re going to discuss it.
And then we will do some Q and A’s for anybody that has questions or maybe clarifications on things as well. So, I mean, jumping right into it, do you want to give an overview of what you thought of everything that you’ve read so far? Do you want to just jump into the one thing from Gingras Appeal that we can pull up and look at and, and just kind of go from there?
What do you
want to do? I think that makes sense to kind of give an overview because when we talked about this sort of just on the surface a couple of months ago. My initial impression was that this was not going to end up being a rule 26 issue, a rule 11 issue. And for those who are kind of just jumping back into this, you know, the main thrust of Gingras’s appeal was that the sanctions that were awarded, the 150, 000 in fees were awarded under rule 26, which is a very narrow rule in Arizona law that is modeled after federal rule 11.
that says if you sign a pleading that is not in good faith, or if you don’t have a good faith reason to believe what you’re saying in a written pleading only, you can be sanctioned for it. And for Rule 26 and Rule 11 only, in order to ask the court for sanctions against someone, you first have to put them on notice that you’re going to do it.
And they have to be given what’s called a safe harbor period to say, okay, you know what? I give up. I’m going to withdraw that pleading. You’re right. So that we don’t spawn too much litigation about nothing, in essence. And so the thrust of Gingras appeal was that the sanctions were based on Rule 26, and Laura did not receive proper notice that there were going to be sanctions under Rule 26 at issue.
And Laura was not given a safe harbor period. So when I read his appeal, just my reading of the appellate brief, I said, this seems like there’s kind of a hole in his entire argument,
which is, Imagine that.
Yeah. Right. Which is that he may be right about rule 26. I actually found some of what he said persuasive, but it looked to me like there were a whole host of other statutes under Arizona law, completely separate from rule 26, under which the court awarded sanctions.
And he really did not meaningfully address those issues. And so I kind of guessed that that would be a large part of the answering brief. That Winnick’s firm filed. That it would focus on, you know, look, we did comply with Rule 26, or we tried. But it really doesn’t matter. Because the sanctions awarded were not awarded under Rule 26.
They were awarded under other rules that do not have this kind of safe harbor period requirement. And I love saying this, I was right. That is the main thrust of the answering brief as well. It is that Gingrish really set up And I think we see this kind of in his. YouTube’s and in his, you know, kind of rants, if you will, he sets up a real straw man argument, you know, puts, he throws this red herring out there, builds it up, kind of twist it all around, and then says, that’s not right.
And he may be right that that argument is not right, but that wasn’t really the argument that was being made. So a lot of other things, but that’s kind of the 10, 000 foot view. Okay.
So I know that Gingras will either, he’s either watching this right now or he is going to watch it because I know that he is a fan of you.
And I do say that sincerely, he’s obviously, I know he likes to rip on anybody content creators that talk about what he talks about because his thing is, I’m a lawyer in Arizona and you’re not, you, you can’t possibly know what I know. So. Now he’s matching wits against somebody as educated as yourself.
You might not be practicing in Arizona. And when you did talk about this, the first time that he addressed the fact that he liked that I had you on, he did say, I agree with a lot of what you said, but some of the stuff that she said, I don’t agree with because she doesn’t know Arizona law. So we already know that his response is going to be talking about, well, Rachel doesn’t understand Arizona law in particular cases.
Is there anything that you can address in regards to that? That you’re like, well, I actually have gotten caught up on Arizona law. So I don’t think while I might not practice out there, I am caught up on it now.
So, yeah, it is definitely true that if you’re not practicing in a jurisdiction, you may not for, for rules that exist, like reasonable fees can be awarded.
You may not have as good a sense of, well, what is reasonable really mean out there? Do they tend to award all the fees? Do they tend to award some of them? Yeah. Because that’s really more of a practical issue that you have to kind of be, you know, boots on the ground in order to know. But I think what a lot of people don’t necessarily know about law is that you don’t, when we go to write a brief, when we go to respond to issues, we understand the general law, and particularly in family law, we know the statutes in California, I’m sure he knows the statutes in Arizona, off the top of his head.
But we don’t know most of these cases, except the very famous one, you know, a handful. I can think of maybe 10 in California, 20, but I definitely know because they’re cited all the time. But we go and do independent research of the law and how statutes are interpreted every single day, even if you’ve been practicing for 30 years in a particular jurisdiction.
So I went and looked at the actual cases that were cited by both parties. And that’s what the appellate justices are going to have in front of them. And this is not a situation where they’re going to say, Oh, you know, I have all this independent knowledge of the law that neither of these parties thought of.
The appellate justices are going to read these briefs and read the cases. And that’s the same position I’m in. So it becomes much less significant to have a boots on the ground understanding of, you know, how the law works in practice. when you have the benefit of both sides briefing and you actually do like I did read all of the cases cited or
most
of
them.
Yeah. So do you want to just jump right into the main thing from Gingras’s? So let’s start with let’s do a Gingras’s appeal. Let me pull that up. Let’s see. You got this. Can you see this?
Yeah.
Hold on a second. There we go. All right. So
yeah, so this is page 15 of Gingras’s brief. And
I don’t know why it’s cut off, but there we go.
That’s okay. There you go. Yeah, there we go. So appellate briefs are very formulaic in the sense that there are specific things they need to cover in every single brief. Every single appellate brief has to have a statement of the case and then a statement of facts and then a statement of the issues. And those may sound like three of the same things.
They’re not. Statement of the case is kind of in one or two sentences. What is this case about? Then you have the statement of facts, obviously, which is what Gingras really focuses. You know, a lot of his time on when he went through his own brief, and then statement of the issues, which is really how you frame the issues on appeal.
And so this is how Gingras framed the issues that are on appeal. And sometimes there isn’t an agreement necessarily about what the correct issues on appeal are. Sometimes the parties disagree. You know, that’s an issue. No, it’s not. His brief, I think really nicely sets out what the actual issues are. And then Woodnick’s brief, instead of kind of dancing around with the issues are takes them on head on.
So I just kind of wanted to start by looking at his issues and kind of breaking down the argument.
Okay.
Issue one, which is the first issue that I sort of got into is about rule 26 and he’s put it in, you know, kind of a complicated long worded way. But in essence, issue one is, Did the trial court properly sanctioned Laura under Rule 26, right?
Did it deny her the right to the safe harbor period or did it otherwise permit a sanction under Rule 26? to be imposed when that wasn’t appropriate. The second issue is did the trial judge commit structural error, which is kind of a funny thing to see in family law. And Woodnick’s brief points out in Arizona, and this is another reason it’s helpful to have his brief.
Structural error is something that doesn’t come up in family law because structural error is typically an error with an entire trial. It makes the whole thing unfair. A really good example of a structural error is not allowing a defendant to represent himself in a criminal case. It’s, that thing makes the whole trial unfair because you have a right to represent yourself and if you don’t, it infuses problems into the entire case.
So Gingras argues that the trial judge, perhaps Googling the hours of Planned Parenthood, was structural error and hopefully people are saying, what? Because that’s. That’s exactly right. What? It’s not. That would, that would require the, the entire case to be rehearsed. Issue number three, and this is where we kind of get into the other statutes, Gingras very, I think only the last couple of pages of his brief are even devoted to these other statutory bases for fees.
And you have these laws that are cited, you know, Arizona Revised Statutes 25. 324 and 25. 415. And it’s really important to note what his issue with the sanctions awards under those statutes are. He basically says there was no basis for such an award and no motion for sanctions under those statutes was filed.
So he’s really challenging just the judge’s finding. This is not a hyper technical legal point. Right? You know, that’s, did you comply with the safe harbor period? He’s basically saying there was no basis for such an award. The judge made a mistake. The judge awarded sanctions when that was not the right thing to do.
And when you’re doing that on appeal, when you’re challenging something just based on the fact that it was the wrong conclusion, it is an incredibly high standard of review. The appellate court basically accepts everything the trial court says, and they defer to the trial court in every way. And they only reverse if there’s a complete abuse of discretion.
Like really, it’s just so absurd that the trial court has actually abused their power. And then issues four isn’t really, I think we could skip over issue four because it’s not really a salient issue in either one. And then issue five is Laura entitled to her attorney’s fees and costs on appeal. That’s that’s completely collateral to the issues we’re talking about.
This is about this appeal. So before we move on, I just kind of wanted to bring up the statutes that are at issue and it’s 25, three 24. All
right. That’s a attorney’s fees. Here we go.
Yes. So this is a statute that looks a lot like a statute that exists in California, which basically says in family law, because these are family law rules that the judge can do something that they can’t do in criminal cases or civil cases.
Okay. What they can do is they can consider the financial resources of both parties and the reasonableness of all the positions they’ve taken in the proceedings. And they can make one side pay the other’s attorney’s fees. It’s just kind of a blanket you know, a blanket, a blanket blank check, if you will.
It’s an, it’s an opportunity for a court to award attorney’s fees, not for something very specific, but just I’ve considered the reasonableness of what everyone’s argued and their financial resources. And I think you should pay some of her fees. And that happens every day in family law here for people where there’s just a disparity in financial resources.
If you have one person in a divorce with enormous resources and another person who doesn’t have enormous resources, they often pay a lot of the fees, even if they don’t do anything wrong. So it’s important to understand that unlike rule 26. ARS 25324 is a really broad fee shifting statute, which basically says I’m, I’m allowed to look at the reasonableness of every position taken in this case and decide if one party should pay, should pay the fees.
Now, the other important part of this is B is section B because the other component of 324 is that if the court determines that a party filed a petition under one of the following circumstances. The court shall award reasonable costs and fees to the other party and shall is very important because shall in the law is mandatory.
It means you must, the court must effectively award reasonable costs and fees. Not the court may or the court can consider, but the court shall. And obviously one of the things here is the petition was filed for an improper purpose. Laura’s petition in this case. Laura’s petition was not filed in good faith.
I mean, those are all allegations that have been made. And then I think Judge Mata and many of us, I believe, have absolutely been proven as well. So this is one of the statutes that we’re going to look at. And it is much broader than just Rule 26, which is limited to signing a pleading. This has to do with, is it reasonable to ask for mediation when you know you’re not pregnant anymore?
That in and of itself, that is a position that may or may not be reasonable. And that is something that can be the basis for sanctions under this rule, whereas it couldn’t be a basis for sanctions most likely under rule 26. So that’s the first sort of general statute.
Yeah.
Then you also have 25 415.
Here it is sanctions for litigation misconduct.
Yes. And again, you have the court shall sanction a litigant for costs and fees incurred by an adverse party. If the court finds that the litigant has done one or more of the following knowingly presenting a false claim, knowingly accusing another party of making a false claim, and then really critically violated a court order compelling disclosure or discovery.
And this is where the Planned Parenthood stuff really comes in. Because we know that, you know, Gingras has made a lot about the sort of shifting views about Planned Parenthood and did not do her own research. Laura’s defense to, you know, why she kept changing her story about Planned Parenthood was that she didn’t want Clayton to know where she went because she didn’t want him to be able to get her medical information.
And I guess she says that because she thinks that will be helpful to her. In fact, it’s the opposite of helpful because there were discovery orders in this case that required her to disclose that information and she disclosed it falsely. And she sent Clayton on wild goose chases to Planned Parenthoods that she never went to.
And then on the eve of trial, at trial, she completely changed her story. So, this is another sanctions statute. And sanctions are just attorney’s fees. It’s just We call them sanctions when they are intended to punish. The prior statute we looked at, which is that attorney’s fees, that was not a punishment issue.
That was just a fee shifting issue. Sanctions, when you hear sanctions, it means punishment, basically. I’m punishing you for taking bad positions or unreasonable. So, and then there’s a third statute, which I think is less, I don’t even think, you can pull it up really quickly, but it’s, it’s less on point but a third way.
is 25, you know, nine. And that’s just, that’s a third way, but it’s really not, I don’t think quite as on point here. So I think just having that background on 25, four 15 and 25, three 24, again, on the one hand, this reasonableness of the positions and the financial resources of the, you know,
and
on the other hand, punishment for bad conduct.
And we know that Laura. And Judge Mata found in her ruling claimed to be making about 200, 000 a year or something close to that. And if that is true, if she didn’t lie, when she said that, that is no doubt part of the reason why Judge Mata found it was appropriate to award attorneys fees and sanctions because she has the financial resources to pay them.
All right.
So we’ll go to, you want me to bring up Woodnick’s? Yes,
let’s go to Woodnick’s brief.
All right. So here’s page 16. We want to start here. All right. So here’s Woodnick’s briefing and you wanted to start at page 16 and kind of go over this. So go ahead.
So as we kind of talked about last time, the statement of facts in an appellate brief is really supposed to be pretty dry.
It is not typically supposed to be really spicy and out there. And this, this brief is written much more like an appellate brief, I think, than Gingras brief, but this is kind of where it starts to get, to me, the legal arguments kind of start to formulate, which is that they notice right up here at the beginning that the court also awarded Clayton attorney’s fees and costs based on the two statutes we just looked at, 25.
324B and 25. 415B. with a two page explanation of the findings supporting the award, and that is really critical and it really kind of underscores why Judge Mata took nine, 17, 19 pages, whatever it was, to go through all of the bad conduct because it is relevant not to rule 26 but relevant to these two statutes.
And
when you appeal something and there are three possible bases for an award, In other words, if the court could have sanctioned her under Rule 26, under 25. 3. 24 or under 25. 4. 15. The appellate court just has to find that one was appropriate in order for it to stand, right? Because it only needs one leg to stand on, you know?
So what he does is he goes through that Laura, all of the, a lot of the things that Laura did, and then also starts to touch on the things that are just, you know, so obviously sanctions issues. like altering evidence, falsely responding to discovery, which you, which you respond to under oath, right? When you, when someone says, answer these questions about the case and you answer them, you answer them under oath, just like when you’re testifying.
And so what we really get here is we’re starting to lay out the basis for why there is more than sufficient basis to award the sanctions under these other statutes.
Yes.
All right. So
now move on to 18 statement of the issues. Yes. Jurisdiction.
So this is, this just kind of says, look, they’re going to take, I always think it’s very interesting when parties in an, in a responding brief, they can make a choice.
They can respond to the issues exactly the way the other party has responded to them, or they can kind of frame them differently. And it’s a really interesting choice, right? Whether you kind of reframe the issues or not. This tells me that, you know, Woodnick’s firm was confident enough. That they could address all these arguments that they don’t need to kind of like reframe the issues They’re just gonna tick through them one by one by one So they go through and they say Laura’s opening brief argues five issues Which are the ones we just looked at and they’re gonna take them on one at a time so we start to get into the argument and I guess we can go to page 20.
Why don’t we go to page 20? Okay. Because this is where we start to get to the, to issue number one.
Yeah.
Which is what we’ve all been saying. The court did not sanction Laura under rule 26. I will tell you, this is not entirely clear. It simply isn’t. Judge Mata’s order leaves a little bit, and I reprinted it to, you know, to go through, leaves a little bit to be desired.
In terms of explicitly setting out which statutory bases. She’s awarding fee zone for which specific conduct. It would have been better had she said, you know, Laura falsely responded to discovery. Therefore, under ARS 415B, you know, or fill in the blank, she has violated a court order for discovery. She has done this.
Under 415A, she filed a false pleading, whatever the case may be. She didn’t do that. She kind of discussed all the statutes. And then said, I award fees under all these statutes, which. It leaves a little to be desired in terms of clarity, but it’s not fatal because all the appellate court is gonna have to do is see if any one of the bases was appropriate.
So, here we go through first, and if I were to have one criticism of this brief. I thought they got too bogged down in defending the Rule 26 point, because I, to me, this is a, it should have been, there’s nothing to see here folks, we don’t need to worry about Rule 26, we should have covered it in two minutes and moved on, and they spend a lot of time looking at the Rule 26 argument.
And that’s okay, but it kind of gives a little more credence to the fact that rule 26 may be a real issue. And if it were me, I probably would have disposed of that more quickly because the whole point here is that rule 26 is not, it’s not the applicable statute under which we should really be assessing sanctions.
So page 22 is where we really get into one of the core arguments made here. Which,
Point C.
Yes, see, so Gingras has argued, and this is one of the, you know, real kind of stretches in his argument that if there is conduct that could be sent, sanctioned under Rule 26, and you don’t comply with the Rule 26 requirements, you can’t sanction that conduct under any other statute.
And that’s ridiculous because they’re, why would other statutes exist independent of Rule 26 if Rule 26 was a catch all? And I think if we go to page 23, where this argument continues, where it starts to be clear.
To be clear. Yeah.
Right. Rule 26 applies only to the signing of documents filed with the court.
Okay. And so even if you could carve out some of the things that Laura did, like signing her petition and saying, well, that should have been a rule 26 sanction, there is a ton of conduct that we’ve seen the lying about discovery committing perjury. There’s a big one, right, you know, refusing to disclose information she’s supposed to disclose there’s a whole host of information that wouldn’t even be a rule 26 issue.
Right. And couldn’t even be a Rule 26 issue. So it goes on to explain, sort of at the bottom of that page, that Laura’s argument seems to assume that Rule 26 is the exclusive vehicle, but there is absolutely no authority supporting that broad limitation. And that’s correct. And what I wanted to point out here on page 24 is a lot of the arguments that we make in the law, a lot of the legal principles, a lot of Latin phrases, right, that sound very complicated, are really just based on common sense.
Right? And this is a really good explanation of that. Where, where they argue that the court must consider the practical implications of Laura’s argument, right? And so they say when language is ambiguous, you have to consider what it would mean moving forward. If you look, if you took one interpretation versus another, right?
So that’s a legal principle that you’re supposed to do that, but it’s also really just common sense. You don’t need a law degree to do that. You just kind of need to think, am I making your head hurt?
No,
I know. It’s, you know, you really kind of have to think about the practical implications and they go on to, you know, wouldn’t it goes on to make a series of very compelling to me arguments, right?
that you know, if you adopt JGRIS’s argument, if you believe, if you assume he’s right, that the minute that rule 26 comes becomes an issue, that’s, you have to comply with the save Harvard provision to get any sanctions, then silly things would kind of flow from that. And it would turn into kind of an absurdity because it would make every other law inapplicable.
Every other form of getting fees inapplicable and all and all you would have to do in order to kind of cancel out every other law about attorney’s fees is have rule 26 on the table. Yeah. And that doesn’t make sense. Nor, of course, Does it make sense for it to be the case that if a rule 26 motion is filed, all of a sudden you’re able to get out of litigation and all the bad conduct you’ve done, scot free?
How could that be the case? It can’t. So it’s not necessarily a legal argument, but it’s a, it’s a practical argument. And we do make those sometimes as lawyers all right, so
moving on to Let’s see
So 25 and 26 and I like this just because this is a good example the sort of bottom of 25 and top 26 is another good example of kind of I don’t know.
I kind of call it folksy, you know arguments, right? And you know what they argue here Is that if the court at the very bottom of 25 if the court adopts The argument that Laura is making, which is that once Rule 26 is in play, Rule 26 trumps everything. The phrase Rule 26 will become the family law equivalent of a Beetlejuice or a Voldemort.
Right? Where the magical words, and there actually is a legal principle, believe it or not, which is, which disfavors magic words in most cases. In a couple cases, there are magic words you have to use for certain things. But there’s a legal principle which says, In most cases, you don’t have to use magic words to do anything.
You just have to kind of invoke the principle. And you see here, Arizona law has long disfavored magic words. particularly when prioritizing formality would limit the court’s ability to do what it should. So I like that because it really kind of brings in, it really kind of brings in common sense. It brings in a little bit of fun, you know, to the brief.
Anyway, it’s the legal nerd fun, but it’s fun. You know,
Have you ever seen a briefing that had the words Beetlejuice and Voldemort in it?
Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure. I mean, maybe not Beetlejuice and Voldemort, but There’s some really fun legal briefing out there. You know, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of good Taylor Swift briefing right now.
Oh gosh, I can’t wait. I know,
right before the judges go through all the Taylor Swift lyrics and briefings. I’ll find some for you. All right. So, all right. Okay. So here we go to page 27.
Right here. Laura had noticed an opportunity. Yes.
And what this really underscores is that the trial court, it goes back to the shall that we looked at. The trial court shall award reasonable costs and attorney’s fees if it determines a party filed a petition not grounded in fact, right? And then it goes on to discuss this, this particular case called Grow.
And you know, Gingras made a lot of I, I watched very quickly on like 1. 5 speed and I kind of skipped through it. You know, he, he, he accuses Woodnick of basically lying about authority and I, and I found that to be absolutely outrageous. Okay. Lawyers have to correctly represent authority. They can’t lie.
They can’t say the Groh case says that you can do this when that’s not what it says. Right. Lawyers argue persuasively all the time and framing something in a slightly different way is, is not doing anything wrong. And he takes this kind of, you know, persuasive argument, you know, Woodnick has made and, and, you know, accuses him of doing improper things.
It’s really ridiculous. So what happens in this grow case, which I think is really, you know, it is not directly on point in that it’s a little different, but it, it addresses the fact that you, even if you say, I want to withdraw this case completely, I want to go away. I want it to just be over,
which is what Laura, which is what Laura wanted to do.
Exactly. That is not, that does not mean that the court now loses the power to sanction you for things you did during the case. Right? And that is one of Gingras’s whole sort of, you know, arguments, like she just wanted the case to go away, away.
And Clayton wanted to continue with it.
Right. And Clayton, and Clayton could have just left with no attorney’s fees and before anything happened.
But that’s not true. She dragged this guy’s name through the mud. She accused him of all sorts of terrible things. He did incur attorney’s fees, but that this case is basically explaining that’s not how it works. And if you see in footnote six here, this is kind of just an interesting point. The issues in family law that we’re dealing with, the sanctions awards, attorney’s fees awards, there’s typically not a whole lot of what’s called published opinions, published cases about them that are citable because most family law cases do not get appealed.
Most people can’t pay for an appeal. Appeals are very expensive and most family law issues are abusive discretion issues Which means it’s hard to overturn a judge’s decision. Not all of them, but most of them So this kind of underscores I think the fact that you know They’re citing here a case that is not citable but doing it properly saying here I’m just you know, referring the court to this even though it’s not a citable case And it says no other opinion adequately addresses an award of sanctions under rule 26 after petitioner attempted to withdraw their pleading.
And that’s kind of the world we’re working in here. There is no definitive clear law that is going to give anybody the answer here. There are no cases that are going to give you the absolute answer because there just aren’t a lot of published cases in family law in any jurisdiction because they’re not the type of cases that typically get appealed.
And if they do get appealed, they’re not the type of cases that appellate courts will usually say, you know what, this is a really important case for us to publish so that everybody can learn from it and see it and et cetera. So, all right.
Go down to D and
28. Yes. Okay.
Rule 11.
So again, this is where I might not have focused on this as much, but this is the argument that even if the trial court had sanctioned Laura, only under rule 26. Which is not what happened.
A counterfactual hypothetical. My, that makes my brain bleed .
I know, I know, I know.
Counterfactual hypothetical. Okay. Yeah. My,
you know, my, my favorite, my favorite thing to do in legal briefs I think are, you know, ’cause we see so many. Have as you got, have as you got, have a manifesto of the financial question as well. So obviously about why the objective of having the police question and whether the bats are, I’m not sure.
Whether that’s in line with the main theme of the day is behavior of the at the
It kind of says that, you know, the court still has the power to do a rule 11 or rule 26. on its own rather than a party bringing a motion and that is what Judge Mata said she was doing and this is really critical, this page because what, what WNCIC has done here, what WNCIC’s firm has done here is compared federal Rule 11 to Arizona Rule 11 to Arizona Rule 26 and keep in mind, these are all three different statutes.
that deal with sanctions for filing a false pleading without a good faith basis. And they, and we, he goes through how those statutes are actually slightly different in important ways. Rule 11 expressly requires a judge to do what’s called an order to show cause. This is federal rule 11 if we were in federal court.
The judge is required to issue a document called an order to show cause why you should not be sanctioned if the court wants to impose sanctions. You have to send out that order to show cause, which we know Judge Mata did not do. But he points out that Arizona’s rule 11 specifically eliminates that requirement.
So we’re still only on Arizona rule 11. We’re not even to 26 yet, but when Arizona adopted the federal rules, it said, you know what? We’re not going to require her to show up. So, you know, Gingras’s argument that she should have issued in order to show cause is ridiculous because Arizona specifically done away with that requirement and then family law rule 26, which is the family law version of Arizona’s rule 11 dilutes the requirements even further, eliminating both the show cause requirement.
And the specific sentence requiring the court to account for the party’s opportunity to withdraw or correct the violation. And that makes sense because in family law, the courts have much broader discretion to sanction parties, to shift fees than they do in any other type of law. So it would make sense that the family law version of this rule would do away with some of the more formal requirements and expand the court’s ability, particularly because of how many pro se litigants.
People without lawyers there are. Laura received ample notice that the court was considering sanctioning her. And she got a full evidentiary hearing to explain her position. And then this is what I like because it is absolutely true for a family law lawyer watching that trial. Laura received more process than most people facing sanctions.
Judge Mata had a two plus hour hearing with witnesses. on just the issues of sanctions and attorney’s fees. That is more process than most people get in a family law court. Laura got more process than the average person. So
keep going.
To what page?
So here we go on. This is just kind of 31, 32, 33. This is, this is showing the differences between these rules. You know, the written notice and this is getting into whether or not the safe Harbor. was provided, whether or not the written notice was adequate. And again, I think they make a somewhat compelling argument that maybe written notice was provided under the relaxed standard of Of the family law rule, but I just, I, to me, I can’t believe we’re already at page 32 and we’re still talking about rule 26 because to me, the slam dunk argument is rule 26 doesn’t even matter.
So we go on for another page or two still talking about rule 26. And then we get to page 35.
Issue 2.
These are going to be, these are going to be quick though. That’s by far the most complicated issue. So issue 2 to me is the next, is the other, the second very interesting issue. Which is, The fact that Gingras claims that Judge Mata googling
the rule that or the hours of Planned Parenthood was structural error that would require reversal.
Yeah.
And they start out by noting that there’s a, there’s a concept. In appellate law called harmless error, which is basically like if you were to review any trial court decision, you would find mistakes.
There’s no doubt that there’d be, there’d be mistakes. You know, in long trials, you have thousands of objections that the court has to rule on. They’re going to be wrong about one of them. So you do not reverse decisions when the error was harmless, when this is like, well, in the broader scheme of things, that’s pretty ridiculous.
Right.
Yeah.
And. The court must disregard errors and defects that do not affect any party’s substantial rights. Otherwise if you made an objection that this party, you know, should have one less minute to testify, and then they say no, they should have one more minute and the judge rules and that was a mistake, you end up reversing the whole trial.
That doesn’t happen. So, appellate courts will uphold a decision unless there’s clear problems with it and what’s called resulting prejudice, right? That it really impacted the proceeding. And then I found this really interesting because this is the kind of research that I am not going to do on my own.
You know, as much as I, as much as I find this interesting, I’m not going to undertake this on my own.
Yeah.
Woodnick has represented to the court that he could not find any example, not even one, of an Arizona court applying structural error analysis in a family law case. So, and that’s Gingras whole argument, this was structural error in a family law case.
Structural error is a, is a kind of unique aspect, I think it says here, it’s a creature of constitutional criminal law jurisprudence, right? There are a few civil cases where it’s used, but structural error is something that so the entire proceeding, that the structure of the whole case.
So it just, just in this case, just in my, like, we all know that, I mean, the way you’re explaining it, Googling something offline or even getting it from somewhere else isn’t a structural error.
It’s a harmless error, right?
Yes, that’s the clear argument. It’s not, I mean, they’re not, they’re not necessarily opposing things, but it’s not a structural error.
So what would be, let’s just say, What would be a structural error that Mata could have made in this case? It’s obviously not being argued by Gingras, because Gingras is saying her Googling is the structural error.
What would a structural error look like in Mata’s case if this, like, make something up that she could have done that Gingras could have said, hey, that was a giant structural error on her part, and this is more
reversed. So, that’s the problem. Is when they couldn’t find a single family law case that had any structural error ever in the history of Arizona law, if I were to try to think of one that would kind of be a little bit analogous, it might be something like if the court had the power to appoint attorneys to represent people that were facing sanctions, and they appointed someone who had been disbarred.
Right. Something like that. They give, they say, Laura, you’re facing sanctions, so you have the right to an attorney to help you or the court were to say, let’s give it, let’s have a jury trial instead of a bench trial, even though there’s no jury trials here. You know, something like that would be a structural error where the whole thing is wrong because you’re not supposed to have a jury, right?
These tiny little mistakes are not structural errors. And no doubt that is why there’s no cases where structural error analysis has been.
Now, I guess if you’re Gingras, you bury your head in books and try and find a case. Is that what you would do?
Absolutely. Of course. Yeah. That’s what you’ve got to try to do.
And that, and that would be presented when he responds to this, if he finds one.
Yes. Yep. And you know, when Nick has done what, what we often do, which is, which is smart, but it’s also truthful. Could he have missed something? Yes. Yeah. So he didn’t say there are no examples, he said we couldn’t find any.
Couldn’t find one.
If there’s a hundred out there, he’s going to look pretty stupid. But if, you know, Gingras manages to find one or two, he just didn’t find them. You know? So.
But if that happens, if Gingras finds one or two, he will say Woodnick lied
in his brief.
He’s going to call him a liar. And your
image should be disbarred, which is absolutely ridiculous, right?
Yeah, it’s exactly
what
he will do.
Yes. And so on the bottom of page 36, I think this, this may go without saying, but the, the reason that Gingras has kind of used this structural error analysis when it’s Clearly wrong, the wrong standard of review, is because it’s the only standard of review where the case could get reversed without any prejudice.
Without showing that there was prejudice. It’s the only way you could reverse a case for this tiny little mistake, right? Any other case, any other type of review, it’s going to be harmless. And even Laura and Gingras must know that with this 19 pages of misconduct that, that Laura engaged in, the, the one issue of whether or not Planned Parenthood Los Angeles was open on Sundays, when she already lied about two Planned Parenthoods already, already falsely responded to discovery about Planned Parenthoods.
It’s like, you know, it’s, It’s a tiny, tiny little needle in the haystack of misconduct. You know, it is not something that anybody could argue in good faith changed the outcome of the case. Right.
Which is what he, I mean, when we’re done talking about the case, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll dive into that. But it is, it is a major, major sticking point because he thinks one, she Googled it on her own time, which a judge is apparently not allowed to do to her father being in the overflow room with the rest of us.
Right. Even though he has no proof of anything the father said he’s going all off hearsay Even if the father did say I don’t know man. This is a great case I want to see him, you know, I definitely think laura’s guilty and all this Is that is that a reason to reverse the whole decision because her father said something?
No, but that’s what he’s saying. It is like he’s literally saying It is that’s what’s so amazing about this
clinton was her father. That would be a problem. Okay You know if if she had had If, if she, you know, hosted bachelor watch parties every day and Clayton was her favorite bachelor, that would be a bias that would be.
But the fact that her dad is coming to trial, even if it’s because he likes Clayton
is
not, I mean, judges have to go live their lives every day, you know?
And her sister follows Clayton on Instagram. That’s another big thing with him. So, oh, she must be biased. She must be a bachelor fan. She must be prejudice against Laura because she’s such a bachelor fan because her sister follows Clayton on Instagram.
It’s ridiculous. And. You know, obviously, we, they argue, which is true, that it is, there’s no evidence that that’s what Judge Mata actually did, but To be completely honest you know, I don’t know necessarily that there’s another good explanation for what she did, but they addressed that. And this was, this was something that, you know, I had not really nailed, like, you know, drilled in on when I was first looking at things.
But if you go to page 40 they go on to explain that even if she did Google Planned Parenthood, Operating hours.
There it is. Assuming arguendo. Why did we say arguendo? What is
that? Assuming like hypothetically. I don’t know why we use all these words. Yeah, where
did arguendo, what can you say? Assuming hypothetically the trial judge looked up the operating
hours.
Exactly right. So assuming that the trial judge did that, there was no prejudice. And here’s why. Because there are a lot of facts out there in the universe that are not reasonably And look, in our, in our new day and age, I guess facts are a funny thing sometimes, but there should be facts that are not reasonably subject to dispute, right?
The best example I know, like that I know of one is what was the temperature in Los Angeles on a particular day? You can go back and find that, right? Was January 15th, 2025, a Wednesday. You go back and look on a calendar, right? And so those are facts that can be the subject of what’s called judicial notice, right?
How would you ever get an expert to come in and prove? that Wednesday the 15th or, or the July 15th, January 15th was a Wednesday. You don’t need to have someone testify about that. That’s, what do you bring in? The calendar guy who makes calendars, you know? So when you, when you have facts like that, that you want to show the court, you ask the court to take judicial notice of them.
You show them a calendar and you say, I want you to see that this is a fact that’s not reasonably subject to dispute. The fact that Planned Parenthood Los Angeles is closed on Sundays is exactly the type of fact. that would be subject to judicial notice. So what they’re saying here is if they had only asked her to take judicial notice of that fact, she would have and we wouldn’t be here.
So not only is this so irrelevant to the outcome of the case, But that would have been an appropriate fact to her consider it for her to consider if someone had just filed a brief about it, right? It’s not like she considered something that should never have been considered, right? So anyway, I thought that was pretty interesting.
All right. I mean, that, that whole thing, like you said, we, the, the, Woodnecks team did not even know until that day about. January July 2nd, the first day she brought it up. She, we were always, they were always looking, like you said, she had Woodnick’s team on wild goose chases for every Planned Parenthood in Southern California.
And she, and then she says on the day of the trial, no, it was actually July 2nd and it was in LA.
And I still continue the more that I think back on this, the fact that she said the, the fact that she so forcefully insisted it was because I didn’t want Clayton to be able to have access to this information is it just hurts the case.
And then on page 43, we get into, you know, the harmless error standard applies. Again, you don’t really need to be a lawyer to kind of imagine that this is harmless error, right? This is the type of thing she did a 19 page judgment. Nobody could credibly say that if Planned Parenthood had been open on Sundays, Laura, Laura wouldn’t have been sanctioned.
She wouldn’t have been sanctioned for all the other crap she did.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah, and that’s the amazing part is I’m just, as the lay person who isn’t a lawyer, I’m just, I’m flabbergasted that he is so hell bent on this Planned Parenthood notice and this Planned Parenthood note that it wasn’t anywhere, anywhere in the depositions.
How did she know? She must have looked it up and it’s like, okay, if she did, this isn’t cause for reversal, yet he is so convinced that it should be. Like, how can you and him, any other lawyer that has spoken on this has basically said the same thing. Even if she did look it up, big fucking deal. Not that big of a deal.
It’s not cause for a reversal.
It is the definition, like this would be a good example to put in law school textbooks of harmless error. It really would, because nothing, you know, when you have all these bases and all this misconduct she engaged in, and a very broad standard for awarding sanctions, the fact that she did, that she lied about one thing when she lied about 70 other things.
It is the definition of harmless error. All right.
Yeah.
