Always invoke the 5th. Especially if you’re innocent.
Yup, perjury trap.
In United States criminal law, a perjury trap is a form of prosecutorial strategy, which is sometimes claimed to be prosecutorial misconduct in which a prosecutor calls a witness to testify, typically before a grand jury, with the intent of coercing the witness into perjury (intentional deceit under oath).
1. If you plead the 5th in a civil case between two non-government parties, you are effectively conceding the case to your opponent.
2. In his career, he only advised a client to plead the 5th ONCE … and that was a case where the client’s conduct was so egregiously stupid that involved a real crime.
3. The client in that case was one of the defendants. Interestingly, in that particular case the defendant’s pleading actually HELPED his case. That’s because in response to the 5th Amendment plea, the defendant’s insurance company filed the papers to withdraw from the case because the 5th Amendment plea made the defendant’s conduct — regardless of what it may have been — uninsurable. Without an insurance company on the hook for a large settlement, the Plaintiff quickly agreed to settle the case for far less than they wanted.
4. This conversation with the lawyer took place in the case where I was involved because the discovery process exposed so much wrongdoing on the part of the PLAINTIFF that the Defendant (my side) won the case. When I asked the lawyer why the Plaintiff’s corporate officers didn’t plead the 5th, he told me something interesting. He said that in my state, a corporate officer or director who pleads the 5th amendment in a civil lawsuit where the company is a party to the case must resign their positions in the company and retain their own lawyers because they have an automatic conflict of interest and cannot serve in a fiduciary role for the corporation anymore.