Today’s Doc of the Day might look at first glance to belong in the giant to file pile.

Lawyers come and go. Especially in a mega firm like Troutman Pepper. And it is commonplace to have an appellate law specialist handle an appeal, if one can afford one.

The name of Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC’s attorney who will handle the appeal I filed against the debt buyer intrigued me. So, I ran it through a Dogpile search.

If you run the name I used for two decades through a search engine, you would get hundreds or thousands of pages of results. Laura Lynn is popular as a first and middle name and as a first and last name. Especially for strippers. lol. I’m not kidding. I once tried and found I was in the wrong business.

Misha Tseytlin, not so common.

It was easy to discover that the attorney PRA brought on for the appeal writes for the Harvard Law Review, is a mucky-muck at the Federalist Society and was the first Solicitor General for the State of Wisconsin. Plus, he is the head appellate attorney at Troutman-Pepper.

At first glance, that is pretty intimidating.

But analyze the meaning. The PRA Group subsidiary came out the chute claiming the case was worth no more than $5,000 plus minimal costs. They put that claim in writing in an OOJ – an Offer of Judgment – before any discovery was done.

PRA has an inhouse legal department with a few thousand employees. They hire outside firms for many of the 3,000 cases they file per week in the United States.

If they think a jury would award a mere $5,000 if the judge lets the case go to a jury, why would they use anyone other than a flunky to handle the case against a 60-year-old layperson who has a health condition that saps her energy?

Well, I am that woman. Brain fog or not, my educated guess is that PRA is afraid of losing another $62,000,000 punitive damage award. And they should be.

****Fun Facts***

Judge Lee P. Rudofsky who presides on the case also wrote for the Harvard Law Review, also is entrenched in the Federalist Society, and was the first Solicitor General for the State of Arkansas.