A wrongful death attorney dispute spilled into Karen Read's civil case on March 6, 2026, when lawyers for Read and John O'Keefe's family accused each other of improper deposition conduct during a status conference. Marc Dillard called the defense's approach “clickbait lawyering,” and Aaron Rosenberg pushed back in open court.
The argument came in a case Judge Mark Gildea said had been pending for 619 days and involved 22 lawyers. Read led the pack with 10 lawyers, while the plaintiffs had five, Waterfall had four, and McCarthy's had three.
Marc Dillard and Aaron Rosenberg
Dillard told the court that 17 of the 19 depositions his team had scheduled were cancelled, and he said many of those cancellations came on the eve of the depositions. He also said Read sent notices of deposition to the parties but did not serve many of the deponents until the last minute.
“This clickbait lawyering is a tactic so she can create a false narrative that these deponents are the ones who are cancelling the depositions,” Dillard said during the March 6 hearing. The dispute gave the judge a live record of how each side is handling discovery in a lawsuit that was filed against Read by O'Keefe's family in 2025.
Judge Mark Gildea
Rosenberg responded that “It’s unclear if we’re conducting a press conference here or a status conference in a civil proceeding.” He also said, “I don’t know what clickbait lawyering is, but what I can tell you, your honor, is that attorney Diller has never, never raised any concern about any date of our depositions with us.”
Rosenberg added, “The accusation that the lawyering is being done for a particular way is completely out of bounds and inappropriate, and it’s designed simply to be conveyed to the public and not to your honor.”
619 Days in Court
Gildea asked Dillard whether he had called any of Read's 10 lawyers, and Dillard conceded that he had not. The judge also said the case had 35 depositions scheduled, a number that sits well above the 19 Dillard said his side had already tried to complete.
The civil case sits beside the criminal record already attached to Read: she was acquitted of charges that she murdered O'Keefe, her boyfriend and a Boston Police Officer, and she was convicted of driving under the influence in her second criminal trial after the first jury deadlocked and a mistrial followed. In the civil case, the immediate fight is not the underlying liability claim alone but how the lawyers are handling the record before depositions move forward.
