Insanity

Tuesday and Wednesday were insane days.

I work on Tuesdays and I also try to play tennis at 6 pm. This requires that I scramble out of the office at a frantic pace in order to pick up the boys and get them home in plenty of time to start dinner. I start dinner, get the boys settled, change out of my work clothes into tennis clothes, give a brief hello to the husband as he walks in the door and head back out to the tennis club.

I play for an hour and a half and return home starved. This past Tuesday, I ate dinner alone at the table reading a magazine, while Chris worked on his lap top in the family room. The boys were already asleep in bed. The phone rang and I opted not to answer when I glanced at the caller id and saw it was an unknown California number.

"Who was that?" Chris yells from the family room.

"No idea, some California number." I respond as I flip the pages of my magazine.

A few minutes passes until Chris yells back, "Oh! I almost forgot. Someone from TMZ called because they need a comment from you."

"What? A comment? What does that mean?" I asked, confused.

"No idea." Chris responds.

I finish up my dinner. After a few minutes, I walk into the family room, look at Chris and ask, "Isn't TMZ some celebrity gossip website?"

Chris shrugs his shoulders. "No idea who it was. They asked if you were available. I said no, that you were playing tennis. They said they needed a comment from you."

"That's weird." Just then, the phone started ringing again. Same California number.

I decide to check my work email. I log on to a number of emails and voice mails, all from TMZ. I get a little nervous, but decide it must be about the trademark applications I filed on behalf of one of the infamous cast members of Jersey Shore. I email our head of marketing to alert her to the media interest and contemplate if I should phone the client's manager.

I decide to wait and take a shower instead. After a quick shower, I come back downstairs as my cell phone beeps to alert a text message. It's from my brother Travis and it reads, "Have you seen The Smoking Gun today? If not, you should."

As my home phone rings yet again, I race to my computer to check out The Smoking Gun. And sure enough, the featured document is one of the trademark applications I filed. I was floored. Absolutely stunned.

I have to admit, it freaked me out alot. There is something paralyzing about seeing your name, your email, your phone number up on a popular website.

Our home phone kept ringing every fifteen minutes for another hour. I figured that while it was a little insane, it would all be over by the morning.

The next day I met with our head of marketing and contacted my client's manager to ask them if they wanted me to comment on the story. I was asked not to comment and we hoped if we simply ignored the calls they would eventually stop calling. The manager warned me it would probably get worse before it got better.

He was right.

The calls just kept coming. I put the calls into my voice mail and tried to ignore them. After I sent a number of calls to voice mail, the reporters called my firm's main phone number, lied to our receptionist and tried to get transferred to me. The reporters also called other attorneys at my firm, using their direct dial numbers, and tried to get transferred to me. After a few hours, a reporter even tried to get the managing partner at my firm on the phone to get me to comment.

Yes, ignoring it didn't seem to work. I had to call the reporters and give them an official "no comment."

In the meantime, the firm had to send out an email to the entire firm asking everyone not to speak to the media. It was completely crazy.

When I finally got the courage to call the reporter from TMZ, he tried to engage me by asking about my "tennis game last night." He was disarmingly kind and funny, but grew less so as he realized I had called to merely refer him to my client's manager. After saying nothing beyond, "Thank you for your interest" and "no comment," I got off the phone as quickly as I could.

The calls stopped until a few hours later when another reporter started calling. In the meantime, I got an email from my client's manager, forwarding a message from the reporter I had just spoken to on the phone. In it, the reporter claimed I gave him great comments on the client, including an outline of her business plan.

Crazy, right?! He outright lied in the hopes of getting the manager to comment when I had not. I may be a bit naive, but I couldn't believe the extents to which this person was willing to go to get someone to say something, anything.

I started forwarding messages from the rest of the reporters to my firm's head of marketing. She offered to call them back to stop the remaining calls.

It was a long, crazy, surreal sort of day, not the ordinary day for a intellectual property lawyer from Buffalo. Not at all.