This guy had his truck repossessed by a large corporate bank. A corporate bank with over a trillion dollars in assets.

Normally, the story would end there, but in this instance, the problem was that this guy was homeless and all of his worldly possessions were in the back of his truck. Before the truck was auctioned off, the repo company took all of his possessions and threw them into a open storage bin located outside their building. This guy went to a law firm looking to sue the Repo company for property damages of his possessions, which he valued at $12,000.00.

It is extremely difficult to get any type of emotional distress or punitive damages in such property damage cases in the state of Massachusetts and the recovery is usually strictly limited to property damages. But what made this case unusual was that the client had photos of his clothes in the storage bin showing them soaked and covered in snow with the bin open to the January weather thus establishing his version of events. Given the obvious evidence of intentional negligence, the guy’s lawyer was hoping to get his client a quick settlement of around $7500, which is a lot of money for a dude living out of the back of his truck.

So the guy’s lawyer starts his case against the bank and the repo company. The repo company’s and the bank’s counsel totaled four attorneys. They impleaded their subcontractor who in turn impleaded its subcontractor so that by the time impleading and cross claiming was done, there were six defense counsels on the case. By the time these defense counsels working on a billable hour basis were done and the case finally settled on the eve of a jury trial, they successfully generated $80,000.00 in legal fees. So a case that would have settled for $7,500.00 eventually settled, with the addition of emotional distress and punitive damages, for $30,000.00. In exchange for $80,000.00 worth of legal work, the bank was able to more than quadruple their expenses for a case they could have settled a year and a half earlier.

When you have a trillion dollars in assets, you are not required to act intelligently.

The attorney joke book: “How Many Clients Does It Take To Change a Lightbulb? A Lawyer Strikes Back”

(Courtesy of the Legal Humour blog)

Look for a review of Diviacchi’s book in the next few weeks.