Judge’s order vacates up to $312K in bad-faith sanctions at parties’ request
Updated: After a federal district judge’s opinion blasting a law firm and its corporate client over what he describes as their bad-faith litigation tactics, a federal magistrate judge made a sanctions recommendation and later vacated it.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Walter Johnson said in a Jan. 29, 2010, report two lawyers affiliated with the now-defunct Adorno & Yoss and the firm’s ex-client should pay nearly $312,000 to reimburse the defendants for their legal fees and costs in a hard-fought trade dress case.
The $311,836.32 represented a nearly 30 percent discount on the legal bill submitted by Stites & Harbison, the Fulton County Daily Report wrote.
But in a March 18, 2011, order (PDF), Judge Charles Pannell Jr. vacated the prior court orders awarding sanctions in the Northern District of Georgia case. The parties resolved their underlying claims and requested that the orders be vacated.
“The court finds no error it its prior orders and adheres to the findings and conclusions made therein,” Pannell wrote in the March 2011 order. “Nevertheless, the court will vacate its orders solely for the purpose of facilitating settlement in the case and because all interested parties have requested this court to vacate its orders pursuant to their settlement agreement.”
Pannell’s Dec. 2, 2009, order held that Cary Ichter, Guy Weiss, the law firm and their former client “blatantly misrepresented” the law and behaved with dishonesty.
“For such conduct to go uncorrected would result in no meaning to the oath of a witness, no meaning to the conduct among attorneys, and no rule of law,” Pannell wrote at the time.
Responding by e-mail to a Daily Report request for comment in February 2010, Ichter, who now heads his own law firm, expressed “the utmost regard for the court,” but says he believes it erred. “Although our work was imperfect,” he writes, “we operated at all times in good faith to zealously represent our client within the bounds of applicable law and rules.”
Weiss and the partner in charge of Adorno & Yoss’s office in Atlanta didn’t respond to the legal publication’s phone calls in February 2010.
Updated Nov. 6, 2017, to note the 2011 order to vacate prior court orders awarding sanctions in favor of the defendants based on the conduct of the plaintiff in the case and its former counsel.
