Daily Dicta: When Suing Your Ex-Fiancee Isn’t Such a Great Idea
4.06 Carat Old European Brilliant Diamond Ring, Diamond engagement ring (Photo: Courtesy photo)
Litigators litigate. It’s how they problem-solve.
But you’ve got to wonder if Ryan Strasser wound up regretting his decision to sue his former fiancee after she allegedly refused to return the $100,000 engagement ring he gave her.
Not because of the ensuing fight (or lack thereof)—she failed to respond after being served. Now, Strasser has until Jan. 23 to move for default judgment or U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth last week ruled that he’ll toss the case for failure to prosecute.
Rather, the Troutman Sanders associate is quasi-famous as the lawyer who got taken to the cleaners by an art history student with extremely expensive taste in jewelry.
I was the first to write about the case in September, when Strasser filed his complaint against Sarah Jones Dickens in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In retrospect, it strikes me as a valuable cautionary tale for those so caught up in feeling wronged that they may not fully consider the ramifications of litigation.
Because now, if a prospective client Googles “Ryan Strasser lawyer,” the top 10 hits include Lit Daily’s scoop, Ouch, Babe. Big Law Associate Sues Ex-Fiancee Over $100K Engagement Ring, as well as follow-on stories including “This D.C. lawyer is suing his former girlfriend for the return of a $100,000 engagement ring” (MarketWatch), “Virginia Lawyer Sues for Return of $100K Engagement Ring After Breakup” (NBC 4 in Washington) and “'Til debt do us part: Lawyer sues his ex-fiancee for refusing to return the $100,000 engagement ring that he will be paying off until 2020” (The U.K’s Daily Mail).
Other publications including GQ, Fox News, the New York Post, iHeart radio, CBS Philadelphia, the ABA Journal and Above the Law covered the story. So did web publications ranging from Modernluxury.com to 247sports.com to DCurbanmom.com. There’s even a story about the dispute
in Italian—and another in Polish, in Vietnamese, in Korean, in German, in Russian.
Clearly, it struck a chord—bad things happening to privileged millennials—that triggered a burst of schadenfreude world-wide.
Poor Ryan Strasser (who did not respond to a request for comment) probably figured the suit would just slip by under the radar, like most lawsuits do. After all, it’s not as if it involved millions of dollars or celebrities or important questions of social justice.
And he might have gotten away with it (cue Scooby-Doo voice) if not for the eagle eyes of ALM editor Mike Scarcella, who flagged the complaint filed on Sept. 24 and passed it on to me. And in today’s viral world, all it took was that one story to light the match.
To be honest, if Strasser had been, say, an engineer or a podiatrist, I might not have written about his suit. But a Big Law associate, who started his career at Hogan Lovells and is now at Troutman Sanders? Irresistible.
That’s the thing about filing a lawsuit though—it’s hard to predict up front if it’s going to proceed quietly or explode publicly. Which means you have to contemplate both.
The 23-page complaint (plus 48 pages of exhibits, including photos) by Steven Hollman of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton was incredibly rich in detail. It offered a veritable blow-by-blow of a relationship gone bad, from their meeting as undergrads at Duke to her calling his parents to come and get him after they broke up because he “would not stop crying.”
Was all this sharing, um, wise? Because if the complaint had been bare-bones, and just focused on the actual legal claims—replevin for a wrongfully possessed engagement ring and known chattels, conversion for wrongfully possessed ring and chattels, and damage to plaintiffs leasehold—it would have removed much of the oxygen from the ensuing blaze.
But perhaps Strasser found it too tempting to use the court filing lay out his version of the events, casting his onetime love in the most negative light possible.
He was viciously successful, but he didn’t come across looking so hot either. Yes, she was allegedly the one who said she expected him to propose within a year of the start of their relationship, and that she “had to have” a ring that was 3.5 to 5 carats with an inclusion rating of no “worse” than VS2 and a color rating of no “worse” than G, and with no fluorescence.
But he was the one who knuckled under and agreed to shell out $100,000 for 4.06 carat ring—a near-colorless, old European cut brilliant diamond that was mounted in platinum with 14 diamond accents. (“Although he repeatedly told defendant that the price far exceeded his budget, Mr. Strasser eventually acceded,” the complaint says.)
Strasser, at the time an associate at Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C., made good money, but he had to tap his savings, two credit cards and a $30,000 personal loan (which still costs him $912.71 a month in installments) to pay for it.
As it turns out, he’s stuck paying for more than just the ring. The cost to his reputation may be priceless.
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