This week, I received a Report and Recommendation in a case I have been intimately involved with over the past two years, including living out of hotels in Florida for about eleven months of that time.
Last year, we got the court to dismiss the case as a fraud upon the court.
The Report I got this week was written by the Magistrate Judge in the case, and concerned our request that the other side be forced to pay our attorneys’ fees and costs. The Magistrate recommended that we be awarded 100% of our fees and costs, totalling almost $1.6 million. The Magistrate included extremely high praise for the work we did, including such gems to the effect that my client could not have chosen better legal representation, and that we performed a service to the court by uncovering a serious abuse of the judicial system.
We still need the Report confirmed by the District Judge, and then we face the nasty task of actually collecting from the bad guys, but it’s a good feeling when the judge recognizes that we performed a valuable service not only to our client, but to the legal system.
I’ve already gotten drunk in celebration; now I go home and sleep for a week.
The debate is whether or not parties should be held responsible not only for their actions prior for litigation, but also for inappropriate litigation itself.
To save on needless debate, Sua has already announced that he has won.
Congratulations, kiddo! Folks don’t often get that sort of compliment from the bench.
While the Report is a public record, I’m a little loath to discuss details until the final judgment comes down. The general overview is that a guy sued my client, alleging that a product he purchased from my client was defective. We proved that the guy suing us didn’t actually own the product, but it instead belonged to The Bad Guy, who had an extensive record of felony convictions for filing fraudulent claims. We further proved that The Bad Guy purchased the product with the intent of suing my client and extorting a large settlement through false threats of class actions, negative publicity, etc. The judge found that the whole lawsuit was an attempt to use the court’s processes to commit blackmail.
