Akin Gump and the Case of The Mom and Pop Candy Shop

So Mom and Pop, owners of the Mom and Pop Candy Shop, spoke to a psychiatrist about their employee, Bill. They didn't know they weren't supposed to do that, just being a Mom and Pop who had an 8th grade education; they were not aware that a psychiatrist's failure to personally examine an individual renders the psychiatrist's opinion unreliable.

In any event, regardless of the value of the psychiatrist's opinion, Mom and Pop decided Bill could become violent and resolved to terminate Bill, a black employee. Mom and Pop are not bad people who discriminate. They're just not too bright. 

Where did we see this argument before?

William Hundley, Esq. of the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, who later served as Vernon Jordan's lawyer in the Starr Investigation of the Monica Lewinsky matter, tried to pull the same trick with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991. William Hundley feigned ignorance of the terms of his client's plea agreement.  The Fourth Circuit didn't buy it.  The Court found, more or less, that a lawyer (unlike an unsophisticated layman) knows what he is doing when he does it.  But the D.C. Courts did buy what might be termed the "I'm just a simple country lawyer" routine  in Freedman v. D.C. Department of Human Rights, D.C. Superior Court no. MPA No. 95-14 (1996), finding that possible flaws in Akin Gump's Title VII investigation into my complaint of harassment were inadvertent and not the product of a knowing plan to discriminate.  Akin Gump conned the D.C. Government, and I scored big time!

Believe me, Akin Gump is no Mom and Pop operation; -- and sometimes Mom and Pop aren't even a mom and pop!