The $65 Million (Pants) Man

D.C. administrative law judge Roy Pearson Jr. isn't making many new friends with his lawsuit seeking $65 million against a local dry cleaner for losing a pair of his pants. The pants, though not encrusted with diamonds or forged from platinum, were very close to Pearson's heart because he also wants damages for "mental suffering."

The American Association for Justice, which sounds like a group of superheros but is the renamed Association of Trial Lawyers of America, filed an ethics complaint against Pearson yesterday with the D.C. Bar and has established a defense fund for Custom Cleaners in the two-year-old suit. No word yet on the size of the fund or whether donations are being collected in $1.25 increments.

This isn't the first time Pearson has filed tons of documents and demanded payment in a court case. Just ask his ex-wife. In 2005, the Virginia Court of Appeals denied Pearson's appeal seeking at least $10,000 in spousal support in his divorce from Rhonda VanLowe, legal counsel for Rolls-Royce North America. Pearson wanted VanLowe to support him because he was receiving unemployment benefits in 2003, apparently before he was appointed as a contract hearing examiner in D.C. police complaints and then as an administrative law judge in 2005.

A trial judge in Pearson's divorce also denied his motion seeking responses to 248 requests for admissions and ordered him to pay $12,000 in legal fees to VanLowe because he was "substantially responsible for `excessive driving up' of the legal costs by `threatening both wife and her lawyer with disbarment' and creating unnecessary litigation," the appeals ruling stated. That all sounds very familiar.

In a strange case of serendipity, Legal Times interviewed VanLowe last November about her work at Rolls-Royce in Chantilly, Va. No dish on her ex, though.