J.D. Crane strikes again

Greetings, television viewers!  J.D. Crane is back, and he's got stories...

One of the partners is on vacation this week, and, realizing how much J.D. Crane has his shiznit together, gave J.D. Crane all her cases to cover this past week.

So I'm in court, and I'm supposed to stop opposing counsel from entering a financial document.  As I'm sitting there, waiting for opposing counsel (to whom we already told to enter it, nonetheless) I realize several things:

1.  One of our attorneys (currently on maternity leave) spent months negotiating with opposing counsel to draft this thing.
2.  Another one of our attorneys actually wrote the damn thing.
3.  The plan requires approval from a regulatory agency, AND IT HAS BEEN APPROVED.

So I'm sitting there, in front of Judge Grumpy no less, with my head in my hands, wondering WTF the partner wants to stop this thing for.

Opposing counsel shows up, and she's a major league hottie (Judge Grumpy is known to be partial to hotties, and hey, who can blame him?).  I tell her the partner wants another status date, to which she flatly refuses to acquiesce.  So we get up in front of Judge Grumpy and opposing counsel (and rightly so...it's what I would have done) just lays into me.  After she's finished, Judge Grumpy looks at me with a confused grimace, as if to say "WTF counselor?"

As they say in the parlance of our times, "That's when the magic happened."

Not knowing anything about the case, and having only the facts in front of me, I stated these things:

-Your honor, the attorney who negotiated this is out on maternity leave.
-Your honor, the attorney whose case this is, is on vacation.
-Your honor, the regulatory agency is not a client here, and this is about the clients
-Your honor, we're only asking for a very, very short status date to review this document
-Your honor, to the best of my knowledge, our client hasn't even seen this final draft (true, actually)

The Judge goes quiet for a while, looks at me, then looks at opposing counsel and states, "Continued til Monday, over your objections, counselor"

And that, my little snuggle-bunnies, is how you prevent a document that you negotiated, you drafted, and that's already been approved, from being entered.

I'll be here the rest of the week, tip your waitress.