After 11-Year Wait, It’s Show Time for Plaintiff-Attorneys

The jury in San Fernando Superior Court Judge David M. Schacter’s courtroom was away for a five-minute recess. The attorneys were milling by their tables when Schacter entered, walked to his bench and called them back by spreading his arms wide and bellowing: “Show time!”

Justice was not being mocked. It was working. Slowly, anonymously, good-naturedly and, above all, patiently.

Inside Schacter’s small, modern, wood-paneled courtroom, four South Los Angeles residents were finally going to trial against a huge financial institution after spending 11 years squabbling about home improvement loans that went sour.

For the plaintiffs--John and Shirley Thymes and Charles and Cora Brown--it should have been a relieving, cathartic experience. Instead it was, as Cora Brown put it, “a nightmare.”

It was a nightmare because the Thymeses and the Browns wound up acting as their own attorneys, a challenge that for all its quixotic appeal is almost never undertaken in a civil trial of this complexity, involving 90 court exhibits and a tangled chronology that weaved through loan applications, liens, job estimates, phone calls and possibly forged signatures.

Over the course of two weeks, the Thymeses and the Browns would put everyone in Schacter’s courtroom--including themselves--to a severe test. By the end, several jurors would conclude that if they were ever asked to serve in another of these so-called pro per cases, they would ask to be excused. Watching laymen try to be lawyers was simply too exhausting, they said.

The Thymeses and the Browns, who first filed their lawsuit against Beverly Hills-based Gibraltar Savings in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1980, hadn’t planned it this way. But at the last minute their attorney--one of several they had hired over the years--dropped out. After waiting this long for their day in court, they simply didn’t want to wait any longer. They swallowed hard and went it alone.

And so one day John Thymes, churning with visible anxiety, wearing a dark patterned sport coat entirely too flashy for a lawyer, was examining a witness he’d called the day before.

It was his wife.

Know Too Much

He walked up to the witness stand and began to question Shirley Thymes about a Gibraltar loan document. Their conversation was awkward. John Thymes runs a secretarial service store in the Crenshaw District and has frequently been in courtrooms, and Shirley Thymes once planned to go to law school, but the couple had become so obsessed with the particulars of their lawsuit that to jurors their exchanges were often impenetrable. They simply know too much for their own good.

And then there was the matter of posture. John Thymes had his back to the jury.

“Mr. Thymes,” Schacter said, “when you stand there, half the jury can’t see or hear you. It looks good in movies. . . .”

And with that Schacter began to explain to all concerned why it looks good in movies, how the camera’s desire to focus on the attorney-witness angle ignores the distance that real-life lawyers normally maintain so that they can simultaneously play to the jury.

This was how Schacter played two roles--attorney and judge--during the trial.

A kindly, balding man in his 40s who prides himself on courtroom civility, Schacter had inherited this case from downtown because there were no courts available. He hadn’t read the file. He didn’t know the background. Yet he found himself having to painstakingly regulate the organization and dispensing of hundreds of tiny facts for the benefit of the plaintiffs, separating what they considered truth from what the law considers proof.

Basic Issue

The basic issue in the trial was the contention that Gibraltar--which has suffered severe financial losses in recent years and is now in a government conservatorship--should be held financially responsible for the conduct of an independent home-repair contractor. According to state regulators, the contractor, Reinaldo Gilbert, owner of Mr. Fix-It, swindled dozens of residents and persuaded most of them to finance their repairs through Gibraltar.

In the last decade, Gibraltar had reached financial settlements with numerous families who borrowed money for jobs performed by Mr. Fix-It, but no settlement had been offered to the Thymeses. Gibraltar contended that it had paid for completion of work that Mr. Fix-It left undone. Gibraltar offered a $135,000 settlement to the Browns, but the Browns chose to go to trial. Like the Thymeses, they believed they could obtain significant damages for pain and suffering in court.

Gilbert was enjoined from doing further business a decade ago and was no longer a defendant by the time the lawsuit went to trial. The challenge for the Thymeses and the Browns was to show that Gibraltar was at least indirectly responsible for Gilbert’s misdeeds.

To do this, they claimed that a former Gibraltar loan agent, Mike Garner, had continually vouched for Gilbert even after it became evident that Gilbert was not going to finish the jobs he started.

John Thymes made a stab at questioning Garner, but Schacter quickly broke in. Thymes was not being focused enough. His interrogation lacked sequence. “The dangerous thing when you’re inside your own case,” the judge had observed earlier outside of the courtroom, “is that everything is important to you, every piece of paper you fought for.”

Judge Asks Questions

So Schacter began to pepper Garner with inquiries about if and when he had met Gilbert, whether he had vouched for him, whether he had ever told anyone that Gilbert--who routinely provided Gibraltar loan application forms to his clients--worked for the financial institution.

Schacter routinely did this. He explained procedure. He made sure pieces of evidence were properly numbered. He stopped the proceedings so that Shirley Thymes could leave the witness stand to put in her hearing aid. Outside the jury’s presence he gently nagged Mrs. Thymes to pay more attention to her husband so she wouldn’t repeat questions when it was her turn to question witnesses.

Schacter could have required the Thymeses and Browns to designate one member of their party as counsel, but he decided against it. All four could ask questions and call witnesses.

“Why shouldn’t they have their day in court?” he said over lunch one day. “I figure this thing’s been long enough in the system. There’s no way when this is over they won’t be able to say they had their day in court.”

There were seven tedious days of trial and two days of jury deliberation. On Thursday morning John Thymes, dressed and waiting, received a phone call at his home on 107th Street, a place that remains a hodgepodge from work that was done and re-done improperly in 1977. The call was from the court. The jury was ready.

‘I Feel Satisfied’

The two couples drove to San Fernando. John Thymes was in such a hurry he forgot his coat.

“I feel satisfied,” Shirley Thymes said as she waited in court. “Regardless of which way it goes.”

The jurors came in. The clerk read their verdict. By a 9-3 margin the jury determined that Gibraltar Savings had recklessly made false representations with intent to defraud. The Thymeses and the Browns had won.

But not very much.

The jury ordered Gibraltar to pay the Thymeses $21,182 and the Browns $20,000.

The homeowners were crestfallen. Over the last decade, they estimated that they had spent more than $50,000 on lawyers alone. “No way, no way,” said Charles Brown, a warehouse worker, when asked if he was satisfied.

One of Gibraltar’s two attorneys, Sharon Mason, was, as she said with a smile, “pleased.”

Like any other attorney, John Thymes talked casually with the jurors in the courtroom later. Unlike a professional attorney, he did not hide his anguished belief that the jury had simply not understood the facts.

Several sympathetic jurors told him he was lucky to have gotten as much money as he did.

“John,” one of them said, “what you have to understand is that you had no proof .”

Possible Appeal

John Thymes said he would probably appeal and try to find an attorney to represent him.

Another juror, Jack Lasnik, a Chatsworth resident, was walking out of the courtroom when he stopped a reporter to mention how impressed he was by Judge Schacter.

“He was one of the fairest individuals I’ve ever met,” Lasnik said.

“He was overall fair,” Shirley Thymes said. “He didn’t do us any special favors because we were pro per .”

“The most important factor is to keep everybody calm,” Schacter had said privately the week before. “If I get impatient, everybody’s going to get impatient.”

Of course, he added, this trial was not his highest display of patience. If you wanted to see that you’d have to come back Friday and watch him handle the San Fernando Superior Court’s law and motion calendar.

“That’s where I deal with a hundred lawyers,” he smiled.