The submission of my libel petition was finalized at 1:34 PM on Monday, July 11, 2022, after I cleared up the confusion I’d created by miscalculating my payment when I first submitted the petition two days earlier.
I was looking forward to being able to coast through a few weeks without having to think about legal issues. Tommy had about three weeks to submit an answer – I didn’t know if he would need all that time, but it had taken me more than a month to write the damned petition, surely Tommy would need at least a week or two to respond. Right?
Wrong.
At 9:29 AM the very next morning, less than 20 hours after I’d submitted my petition, Tommy submitted a motion to dismiss my libel lawsuit.
And then at 10:59 AM, exactly an hour and a half later, I was notified via an email from Todd Hill, Judge Bouressa’s Court Administrator, that a hearing on Tommy’s motion to dismiss had been placed on the court’s docket for August 24 at 11 AM.
And then at 2:13 PM, a little more than three hours after that, Tommy submitted his answer, which is basically a defendant’s way of saying “I didn’t do it.”
And then, at 3:59 PM, less than two hours after Tommy had submitted his answer, I was served a Notice of Hearing (NOH), officially notifying me that I had to be in court on August 25 at 10 AM so Tommy could ask the judge to dismiss the libel lawsuit that I had just filed the previous day. (Wow! I guess that Tommy is a Super Lawyer after all!)
But wait! There’s more!
The next morning at 11:13 AM, less than 26 hours after he had submitted his motion to dismiss my lawsuit, Tommy filed an amended motion to dismiss my lawsuit. To me, it looked as though, in his haste to “flood the zone” with one filing after another, Tommy had accidentally left out a major section of his motion, an omission that he needed to correct. It took him a while, but that’s all billable hours for him. I couldn’t help thinking that it must be nice to have a job where you make money even when you have to spend time correcting your own mistakes.
And by the way: Who were the clients that Tommy was billing? I tended to think of my neighbor, Sonia, as his client in the libel lawsuit, just as she was in the easement lawsuit. But in the libel lawsuit, in addition to Sonia, I had also sued Tommy and his entire law firm. So when Tommy was running up all those billable hours, were some of his charges going to be invoiced to his employer, Scheef & Stone? And because Tommy was representing himself, was Tommy going to submit a third of that bill to… Tommy?
“He who represents himself has a fool for a client.”
– Abraham Lincoln
(Yes, I understand that applies to me as well as to Tommy. So sue me.)
It probably sounds like I’m quibbling in my discussion of who Tommy’s clients were and how much he was going to bill each of them. But this turned out to be a critically important issue later in the case – so important, in fact, that a Justice of the Texas Court of Appeals misrepresented it when he ruled against me. But I’m getting ahead of my narrative, so you’ll have to keep reading if you want to learn the details of that distressing incident.
Document Links
The libel petition
Tommy’s motion to dismiss
Email: Hearing on Tommy’s motion to dismiss
Tommy’s answer to my libel petition
Notice: Hearing on Tommy’s motion to dismiss
Tommy’s amended motion to dismiss
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