Disbarred lawyer seeks damages in traffic accident
Jury doesn’t buy his testimony
Milwaukee personality and disbarred lawyer Alan Eisenberg was back in court this week — as a plaintiff seeking more than $100,000 in damages for a minor traffic accident.
Eisenberg, 75, used a cane and his attorney’s shoulder to slowly walk to the witness stand, where he told jurors how he needed a wheelchair to get to the courtroom. But while he may have lost a step from his days as one of the area’s most wellknown lawyers, he could still tell a tale once seated at the microphone.
He said he had stopped his Lincoln Town Car to turn eastbound on Capitol Drive from Humboldt Blvd. in April 2014, when a Jimmy John’s driver “rammed” him.
But the jury didn’t buy it. They found no negligence on the part of the other driver, Robert Harmon of Racine. Harmon had testified that both were stopped when Eisenberg pulled out onto Capitol, he took his foot off his brake, looked left one last time and then bumped into Eisenberg because he had stopped again.
Harmon said they both got out of their cars. Eisenberg said, “You hit my car,” and Harmon said he asked if Eisenberg was OK. Next, Harmon said, Eisenberg demanded his driver’s license and insurance with a tone and attitude that made Harmon decline. When Eisenberg said he was calling police, Harmon waited in his car.
The officer who responded also testified. He described the incident as minor and said everyone declined medical attention. He said there was a 3-to-4-inch crack in the plastic cover of Eisenberg’s bumper and he did not ticket Harmon.
In his own testimony, Eisenberg mostly described his precarious health and the activities he’s had to forgo because of it, from his front row seats at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater to umpiring baseball games to table tennis.
He demonstrated for jurors how he had to pull himself hand-over-hand up the stairs at his Lake Drive home, and how he can’t stand or sit for more than an hour or two. “I can’t do anything at the sink except pop pills.”
Much of the testimony also focused on the fact that Eisenberg had been suffering the described pains, ailments and restrictions for years before the accident. When he brought them up during a 2012 oral argument at the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the chief justice invited him to finish his argument from a chair.
Eisenberg, who had been disbarred by the court in 2010, was arguing against a referee’s decision to extend by two years the time he should wait before seeking reinstatement. He lost and his law license remains revoked.
In his closing argument, Eisenberg’s attorney, Ron Bornstein, said Harmon had “literally turned Mr. Eisenberg’s life inside out” and told jurors they could give his client “a new memory, that he fought for justice and got it.”
Patrick Brennan, representing Freewell Inc., the owner of the Jimmy John’s, said the case was all about credibility and that Eisenberg “is not believable. You should not believe him.”