If a lawyer files a civil suit on behalf of an anoymous client, at what point do they need to reveal to the court the identity of the plaintiff? Immediately, or at some later point? (If the latter, then it would seem a lawyer could file a suit on behalf of a fictitious person with the hope of having other, real, people join in, and later drop the original suit before the name needs to be revealed.)
And at what point do they need to reveal it to the defendent? As part of discovery or at some earlier point?
What is an anonymous client? How did I get retained in the first place? Are you referring to maybe clients, like a juvenile, that I would like to keep the name out of the public record?
The lawyer filing the suit knows who it is. But the filing itself says “John Doe” or something like that.
[The recent lawsuits against DeShawn Watson were all filed anonymously, and his lawyer complained about not knowing who the plaintiffs are. So I got to wondering about what the legal requirements were in terms of identifying the plaintiff.]
Well, fifty states and the feds, so fifty-one different legal systems, but here, I could file using a John/Jane Does or initials (for example, Susie Smith, 8 year old girl, referred to as S.S.) but when I do, I then need to convince the judge that I have a good reason for doing so (a juvenile or sexual assault victim is always a good reason) but I will have to immediately notify the defense of who the person actually is and the court will have appropriate, what are called, “protective orders” that prevents the defense from disclosing his/her name except to necessary legal staff and so forth.
The opening words of the 6th Amendmrnt:
In other words, the 6th has nothing to do with civil trials, which is what the oP is asking about.
Good point - are we discussing anonymous to defense or anonymous to the public record?
I would imagine that there’s at very least a common law right to defend oneself properly in court, and it would be very Kafkha-esque to not even know who was suing you so you could defend yourself against the details of the charge.
Or was this a case (cases?) where the defendants want to know if their suit will make it past assorted dismissal motions and actually to trial before they tell the other side who they are? (I.e. do they have a case?)
As others have noted, the defense will be able to learn who the anonymous plaintiffs are very early in the litigation. The names are anonymous on publicly filed documents to protect the identify of parties who are minors and sexual assault victims. It’s fairly common and not controversial. (although in one case the defense objected to keeping my clients’ names confidential while his fine upstanding client was publicly humiliated by our baseless charges. That case settled for a nice amount about a year later).