Two days after entering a $1.2 million judgment against him, a Mobile judge received a six-page fax from the Clarke County jurist on the losing end of the ruling. He filed it with the clerk, made it part of the public record, and ordered the sender to stop.
Mobile County Circuit Judge John Lockett directed Circuit Judge Stuart C. Dubose of Clarke County to cease privately communicating with his court, ruling that the fax amounted to an impermissible “ex parte” contact — a one-sided communication with a judge that deprives other parties of their right to be informed of everything before the court.
The document lacked the certification the law requires, Lockett found, leaving him no choice but to treat it as improper. Under Alabama’s rules of civil procedure, communications directed to a judge outside the presence of the opposing party must be served and certified like any other filing; a document that arrives without that certification exists, formally speaking, outside the case, and a judge who chooses to read it anyway risks tainting the record. Lockett’s solution was to pull the document inside the record — by filing it publicly — rather than let it circulate in the shadows.
“The court hereby files the six-page facsimile with the clerk and makes it part of the record,” Lockett wrote.
‘It must not be recorded’
What the fax contained was, by any measure, extraordinary. It included copies of two letters Dubose had written to his own attorneys. The first laid out his defense of his handling of the estate at the center of the case. The second likened the impact of the adverse ruling to the death of his “father or other close relative.”
Dubose did not confine himself to disagreement. “The court could not have entered a worse ruling than it did,” he declared. The order was not lawful, he argued, and there was “no justification” for holding him personally liable.
“Not only is it not legal, but it is immoral,” Dubose wrote. “The order must not become public knowledge. It must not be recorded.”
He feared, he wrote, that the judgment would “ruin” him professionally and financially. He contended that the malpractice claim naming him individually had been dismissed. And he demanded that his insurance carrier be made to pay at once.
“Let there be no confusion,” Dubose wrote. “I demand A.I.M. pay the full limits of my coverage immediately, and that you notify (Weaver’s attorney Pete) Burns, etc., that I have made this demand and am attempting satisfaction, and remind him that pursuant to the purported settlement agreement he can’t publish this ruling, which would include a prohibition against recording it.”
The effect of Lockett’s order was to do precisely the opposite: the letters, and the demand that they be kept quiet, became part of the public file. A litigant who asks in writing that a ruling never be recorded has, in the ordinary mechanics of Alabama courts, guaranteed that the request itself will be preserved — because the only way a trial judge can respond to an uncertified, one-sided plea is to place it on the record where all parties can see and answer it.
The underlying case
The judgment arose from a legal malpractice suit brought by Cheryl Weaver, a friend and caregiver to Joseph J. Sullivan in his declining years. Weaver sued Dubose, then in private practice in Jackson, over his handling of Sullivan’s will and roughly $2.5 million estate. She was the sole beneficiary, and her suit contended that the lawyer’s missteps had cost her what the estate should have delivered to her.
The case had traveled a long road by the time it reached Lockett’s Mobile County courtroom. Claims against Dubose in his official and personal capacities had been litigated separately, and by the time of the ruling he had secured the dismissal of the malpractice claim that named him individually — a fact he pressed hard in his fax, arguing that with that claim gone, holding him personally liable for $1.2 million had no basis in the pleadings that remained.
A $1.2 million judgment against a small-town solo practitioner is not an abstraction. Professional liability coverage for an attorney in private practice in a town like Jackson, the seat of Clarke County, runs to policy limits that are modest by corporate standards, and a judgment above those limits can consume a practice, a home, and years of earnings. That arithmetic explains the urgency of Dubose’s demand that A.I.M., his insurance carrier, pay the full limits of his coverage immediately rather than contest the payout while the judgment stood.
Why the settlement reference mattered
Dubose’s fax also invoked a “purported settlement agreement” under which, he argued, Weaver’s attorney Pete Burns was barred from publishing the ruling. The parenthetical in his own letter — identifying Burns as Weaver’s attorney — was itself a small revelation, confirming that the two sides had been negotiating even as the judgment was entered, and that Dubose believed a deal existed that would have kept the adverse order out of public sight.
Whether such an agreement was enforceable was a separate question. Settlement terms can restrict what parties say about a case, but they cannot restrict what a court does: once a judgment is entered, it belongs to the public record, and no private bargain between counsel can unrecord it. Lockett’s filing of the fax made that tension explicit — a lawyer attempting to negotiate away the visibility of a ruling was negotiating with a court that had no part in the bargain.
The rules against one-sided contact
Ex parte communication is among the oldest prohibitions in judicial practice. Alabama’s canons of judicial ethics, like the codes in force across the country, direct judges to avoid considering facts or arguments that have not been presented to all parties, because the right to be heard belongs to both sides of a case, not only the side bold enough to write directly to the bench. A fax from one party — or one party’s lawyer — laying out grievances the other side has not seen violates that principle even when its contents are passionate rather than tactical.
Judges who are themselves lawyers face an additional layer. Dubose sat on the bench in Clarke County while litigating, in his private capacity, a malpractice suit in Mobile County — a combination that made his conduct a matter of professional discipline as well as ordinary litigation strategy. The Alabama State Bar’s rules govern lawyers’ communications with courts in which they practice, and a sitting judge who bypasses the certification requirements of another court’s rules invites scrutiny on both fronts.
Lockett, for his part, handled the situation in the manner Alabama trial judges typically reserve for such contacts: acknowledge receipt, reject the channel, preserve the document, and give the opposing party notice that it exists. By filing the fax rather than destroying or ignoring it, he ensured that Weaver’s side could respond to the claims it contained — the assertion that a claim had been dismissed, the demand on the insurer, and the reference to a settlement — instead of learning of them later, if at all.
Insurance practice shaped the endgame as much as courtroom procedure did. Liability carriers in Alabama, as elsewhere, owe their insureds a duty to defend and, within policy limits, a duty to indemnify once liability is fixed; a carrier that delays payment on a judgment above which its exposure is capped gains nothing and merely invites bad-faith scrutiny. That was the logic beneath Dubose’s insistence that A.I.M. pay the full limits immediately — every day the carrier held the money while the judgment stood was a day the judgment grew against him personally.
What followed
The filing had consequences beyond the courtroom’s four walls. A $1.2 million judgment entered on the public record against a sitting district-level judge in a neighboring county was the kind of document that travels quickly through Alabama legal circles, and the letters attached to it — with their vivid language about ruin and morality — were now quoted material for anyone with access to the clerk’s file.
For Weaver, the filing clarified the terrain. Her side could now test Dubose’s assertions — the dismissed claim, the purported settlement, the demand on A.I.M. — against the record, and the judgment itself stood as the operative fact unless and until an appellate court said otherwise. Appeals of malpractice judgments in Alabama move through the state’s intermediate and supreme courts on the ordinary schedule, and in the meantime the judgment remains enforceable.
For Dubose, the episode left a record of his own making. A judge who writes that an adverse ruling is “not only not legal, but immoral,” demands that it “must not be recorded,” and then has the demand filed publicly by the very court he targeted has furnished, in six pages, a complete account of his position — one that opposing counsel, the insurance carrier, and any disciplinary body that took an interest could read without leaving the clerk’s office. The court’s order to stop faxing was, in the end, the least of what the fax had cost him.