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prorevenge · 5 years

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Lawyer thinks he's untouchable. Ordered to pay $310,000 for wasting everyone's time.

Strap in - this has been a labour of revenge for me and for a number of people affected by a monster for more than 3 years. Throwaway as some redditor lawyers could work out who I am - and might still anyway.

It needs a fair bit of context/background (TL,DR at the bottom):

I'm a lawyer - and I specialise in litigation - basically fighting commercial/civil cases. It's a B-R-U-T-A-L industry. We fight each other tooth and nail. For example, if the lawyer on the other side makes a mistake (particularly an ethical one - which can be easier than you'd think) we, (well, a lot of us) do things like holding onto such a complaint so we can time it to arrive when it would be really inconvenient, say a week or two before trial. Then we lodge a complaint, to gain an advantage in the case - even if it ends the other lawyer's career.

Anyway, about 4 years ago I started a new job that was close to where I'd lived. I hadn't heard of the firm, but was ready for a change and they did a fair bit of litigation, which suited me.

I quickly worked out that the manager of the firm was next level sociopath/narcissist. This is an industry ruled by sociopaths, I've worked with them before - but this guy was insane. We'll call him Shithead or SH. The guy has a facebook page of ex-employees dedicated to hating him.

So in the short amount of time I worked there I worked this out pretty quickly. Some of the weird/shitty things he did:

His longest and most loyal staff he made pay EXTRA for any legal work, because it was "worth it" as HE looked over the file (although he never made any changes/did anything).

He used to joke with staff about padding out files and working out ways to charge clients extra (update letters/emails once or twice a WEEK) - he even accused me of cheating him by doing an appeal too cheap - it was $75k.

There was no sugar allowed in anyone's coffee/tea - as it might make you hyperactive...

He caused one of our staff to have a mental breakdown by abusing him (not yelling, but verbally breaking down such as "hmmm. I think you might be a bit stupid")

The firm went through more than 100 staff in 2 years.

He's sued his clients repeatedly for his inflated fees. He of course also sues you for his inflated costs of recovering the inflated fees, if you don't pay. And if he loses, he just appeals until you either go broke or give in because you've got what we call "litigation fatigue".

SH had one client, an old man, who died. The estate was administered, and there was a claim over the proceeds from a son who wasn't in the will. So $600k was placed into SH's trust account where he conducted the litigation. It took 4 years and cost $300k (should have been about $20k) - but the only person who could say no was the wife of the deceased, who was extremely elderly and sick. So after overcharging by about $280k, SH gets a call from the wife who says she's extremely sick and has to catch the bus to go to her doctor's appointments and she doesn't know how much time she has left. So what does SH do? Despite repeated requests, tells her he'll get around to it, never does, and keeps sending her bills for the requests to take the money out, and pays them from the remaining $300k. Slowly chipping away at it. Eventually, one of the staff took action and got her the $250k that was remaining from the $600k estate back - and SH was NOT happy. This was actually the staff member who later had a breakdown (didn't leave his house for 6 months) - and when I saw him after was clearly still unwell.

So by now you know we're dealing with a very intelligent, scary psychopath with the resources of a law firm at his fingertips. I quit pretty quickly - and we had a pretty fierce argument, but that's a story for another time.

It was personally terrifying. I now had no job, a massive mortgage on my new home and a newly pregnant wife. And only 1 month's worth of savings if I saved every dollar (not regular expenses). But even with all that I couldn't work for SH. He was just too much of a..... Shithead.

So I started my own law firm I had most of what I needed. Basically working out of my spare bedroom in my dressing gown. I figured if I could keep costs down and work hard on finding work I might be able to scrape by until I was either making OK money, or I could find another job.

Things worked out OK, I was getting by, doing a few small cases, I paid my bills and had some spare time.

So this is where it gets interesting.

A friend of mine (we met after I quit) who had also worked with/hated SH asked if I was interested in a case where SH was suing his ex-business partner. These proceedings weren't personal, not getting too complex, they were proceedings brought by companies. SH's company was a company of straw, it owned nothing. The ex-business partner's company held some assets.

Put simply, the details of the case were that SH was insisting that the ex-partner agreed to something that he clearly didn't agree to. I took the case. It's important to remember that SH's go to position, is he's smarter and richer than everyone else, owns a litigation law firm, and either crushes people with brains, money, or gives them litigation fatigue.

I spent a bit of time arguing with SH (by correspondence) that he was wrong, and there was clearly no agreement. SH then files Court docs that basically ask the Court to force us to recognise that there was a formed agreement.

The Court case took about 15 months, we won every battle along the way (we call them interlocutory applications). Then we got to the trial - and won that as well.

Because we'd set him up, we managed to also get an order of the Court that SH had to personally pay for the costs of the litigation - which was assessed at about $130k. He was very unhappy about this.

So, of course, he appealed. We were in the state's highest appeals Court. We won that as well - and got a personal costs order against him. For about $100k. So he then appealed to the highest Court in the land - think the Supreme Court of the US or UK.

Those costs were unfortunately only $80k.

So there's no where to go from there - he's still arguing the toss about the quantum of the costs orders. But in that time, my law firm is now twice the size of what his was, and his has more than halved. So I'm just getting paralegals to run the costs arguments, they're time consuming, but not complex.

The piece de resistance? I've filed one of those ethical complaints - you know, the ones that end careers. It's going to be extremely problematic for him - and he's about to be charged with a long, and may I say well drafted and comprehensive, complaint about all his unethical dealings. Worst case, he pays a fine and is publicly reprimanded by the courts. Best case - he's thrown out of the profession.

TL-DR - Terrible, terrible psychopath lawyer uses his law firm as a blunt weapon to beat people into submission. Tries and fails - costing himself (personally) over $300k in costs.

*Short edit - to people who:

think that I shouldn't say this - there is nothing privileged here - almost all of it, except obviously my personal experience, is contained in publicly published court documents. All you'd need to do is to log onto my state's/nation's judgment databases to find all these details. I'm comfortable that I'm not doing anything wrong.

Don't believe me - if necessary, I can provide the publicly available judgments to the mods. I'd rather not do it here - as I'd like to preserve some anonymity.

(source) (story by GOWThrowa)

#prorevenge #by GOWThrowa #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #revenge story #last10

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