The lawyers at Fry Law Corporation have another successful verdict to report.
Our Client came to us wanting to sue a former employee for hijacking her business by absconding with all the practices and other employees and starting his own business. We sent a demand letter and got ignored and the Client decided it wasn’t financially feasible to pursue.
A few months later, Client’s served with a lawsuit by the employee (and all others – 3 in total) alleging garden variety wage and hour claims. We agree to assist. She ultimately decides not to pursue cross-claims and wants to try and keep it affordable.
Throughout litigation and discovery, we are having serious trouble seeing liability, but wage and hour cases can get nuclear with enough Plaintiffs and time worked. To help try and save money in legal fees, we opened a dialogue on settlement early on, and received a multi-million dollar demand. Our Client was definitely not in a position to accept liability, let alone pay this exorbitant demand. The business went belly up and she left the industry entirely.
We litigated for a couple years, but the number they were asking for was just not an option. We did written discovery and several depositions.
Knowing the original Client wasn’t collectible, Plaintiffs brought in her mother as a defendant on a theory that she was co-owner/employer. This claim had no merit and was an attempt to extort her for money.
We took a stab at trying to settle on Day 1 of trial, but the other side would not go lower than $500,000.00. We could not advise our Clients to pay that, so we picked a jury and started trial.
Two week trial in Sacramento County.
After Plaintiffs rested their case, we moved for nonsuit (that means, even presuming what we heard from Plaintiffs is true, there is still no case) as to the mom because she had no liability, she was dismissed. We also moved for nonsuit as to a few of the claims, got 1 of them dismissed.
After we presented our Clients’ case, the Jury deliberated for 2 days.
In closing, Plaintiffs asked for $450k and $100k in punitive damages.
Jury came back, found for the defense on all counts but one, a failure to pay some owed commissions. The final award was $4,000.00, 100x less than what they asked the Jury for! Mom will be getting about $10,000.00 in hard costs, since she was dismissed, so they netted a negative ($6,000.00).
All-in-all, it always feels pretty good to take the other side to the mat and clear our peoples’ names.
Here at Fry Law Corporation, we pride ourselves on being able to sue and be sued for our clients. If you want to be in good hands with your legal claims, go with us, we work hard to win. Until then, on to the next one!
