This week we spoke with a client who had engaged a large firm to help handle a dispute with a former business partner. He had paid the law firm $300 000 over twelve months and got nowhere.
He sent us some documents on Monday. We read them for forty-five minutes, discussed the matter for twenty minutes and spent two hours with the client on Tuesday.
Both parties have lost over $1.5 million directly on a failed deal and are blaming each other. Our client’s claim could be as high as $8 million, however, to prove that sort of loss would require very expensive expert advice and a few years of expensive, time-consuming and stressful litigation, so we are now working on a strategy to settle the dispute quickly and get some of the money paid back to them from the other law firm, with the help of the often-dreaded Legal Profession Complaints Committee.
For advice about which approach should be taken in commercial disputes, see Michael Paterson & Associates.