In May 2005, Roy Pearson brought several pairs of pants to Custom Cleaners in Washington, D.C. to get them altered. One of them was a pair of gray pants with blue and red stripes from one of his suits. When he came back to pick up his clothes, the dry cleaners gave him a pair of charcoal gray pants. Pearson said these were not his pants and refused to take them, even though the store’s records, tags, and his receipt all said they were his. Pearson was about to start his new job as an administrative law judge. He had tried on five Hickey Freeman suits from his closet but they were all too tight. He wanted to wear a nice outfit on his first day at work and needed the pants fixed. When the Chungs, the Korean immigrant family who owned Custom Cleaners, could not find his pants right away, things got worse. Pearson asked for $1,000 to make up for it, saying that was how much the pants were worth. The Chungs said no. What happened next shocked everyone in the legal world. According to CBC, court papers show that Pearson could not wear his favorite suit on his first day on the bench because of the missing pants. This problem led him to file a lawsuit asking for $67 million in damages at first, which he later brought down to $54 million. Pearson said his case was based on Washington D.C.’s consumer protection laws and signs at the cleaners that said “Satisfaction Guaranteed” and “Same Day Service.” The lawsuit and what happened after The trial lasted two days in June 2007. Pearson was his own lawyer and told the court the case was like nothing before. “Never before in recorded history have a group of defendants engaged in such misleading and unfair business practices,” he said in court. He even cried on the witness stand while asking himself questions about what happened with the dry cleaners. Pearson wanted $90,000 to rent a car for ten years so he could drive to a different dry cleaner. He also asked for $3 million because of his emotional pain. This week the DC Bar suspended Roy Pearson, a former ALJ who sued his dry cleaner for $67 million for ruining his pants on the theory that "Satisfaction Guaranteed" did not have a reasonableness requirement. No thread, I only want to point out how long this has been going on. pic.twitter.com/S6nfjGxMdB— mostly over there now: ugarles.bsky.social (@Ugarles) June 13, 2020 District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff sided with Custom Cleaners in June 2007. She wrote that Pearson did not prove the pants were not his. She also said that “a reasonable consumer would not interpret ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’ to mean that a merchant is required to satisfy a customer’s unreasonable demands.” The judge told Pearson he had to pay the defendants’ court costs, which came to about $1,000. The case got attention from around the world and became known as an example of a silly lawsuit. The Chungs spent tens of thousands of dollars on lawyer fees to defend themselves. They said the trial was very hard on them both in terms of money and emotions. Like other strange legal fights that got a lot of public attention, this case showed problems with how some people misuse the legal system. Pearson’s time as an administrative law judge ended in May 2007 and he was not given the job again. He later filed a federal lawsuit to try to get his job back but he lost. In 2018, more than ten years after the pants went missing, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals suspended Pearson for 90 days. The court said his way of handling the lawsuit “went beyond aggressiveness and crossed the boundary into abusiveness.” The court pointed out that Pearson had “steadfastly refused to acknowledge contrary legal authority” and kept calling his ideas “indisputable” even during his ethics case. The story is now seen as a warning about crazy lawsuits and what can happen because of them.