Benefits & ERISA Law

Two Farmers Walk Into a Trial . . . .

Well, just finished a trial, which has kept me from posting for a week or two, and I don't have anything substantive to say about the topics of this blog today. I thought, though, that I would share a humorous anecdote told by a witness at my trial, who used it to illustrate a defendant's habit of raising serial defenses, one after the other, and each less plausible than the one before:

Two farmers live next door to one another. One farmer has a cabbage, the other farmer has a goat. They wake up one morning, and the first farmer discovers that his cabbage has been eaten; he says to the other farmer, your goat eat my cabbage. The second farmer responds: 'What cabbage? You never had a cabbage - and if you had one, it wasn't eaten; if it was eaten, it wasn't eaten by a goat; if it was eaten by a goat, it wasn't eaten by my goat; and if it was eaten by my goat, he's insane.'

Funny to me, anyway. The perfect illustration of pleading in the alternative.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on November 20, 2009 (boomark / email).