Something There Is That Loves a Wall

“I’ll take you to court!” is a common-enough threat, but it’s the rare person who can take the court to them. Gregory Brown, a business litigator at Brown & Charbonneau in Irvine, is one such rarity.

“I’d say it’s close to 100 pounds,” he says of the portion of wall from the San Francisco Superior Court that sits in his office. “Probably 24 inches by 30. It’s big. Four inches thick of solid granite.”

How did it wind up in his office? In the early 2010s, Brown had a trial in that very courtroom: “A fraud case,” he remembers, “and breach-of-contract warranty over roofing materials.” Knowing the trial would be long, he and his team rented an apartment by the Embarcadero. One day, they saw a low rectangular dumpster next to the courthouse filled with granite. They assumed a truck had smashed into the side of the building. “I noticed a couple of the pieces actually had the letters from San Francisco Superior Court. I’m like, ‘Wow, that’d be a good little souvenir.’”

He presumes they grabbed it on the way out since he doesn’t remember anyone hauling a portion of the court building into the courtroom. As for how it got down the coast? “I think it came back with all the war room stuff— our computers, printers, charts, and equipment that we had for the trial.”

It’s got company. “I’ve got mementos from as many of my trials as I could over the years,” he says. One is a simple—or not so simple—bottle of water. “I was defending a water bottling company, and they were being sued for selling tainted and green water. During trial, the other side brought a sample of it. We had never seen it before. We weren’t able to test it. We weren’t able to do anything. And in closing argument, I just grabbed one bottle out of the case and drank it during my closing argument. The point being, if it had E. coli in it, I wouldn’t be drinking it. Don’t ask me how I got away with it, because if I were on the other side, I would have jumped up. It was just one of those things I did on the spur of the moment.”