Lawyers & Client Face $312K in Potential Bad-Faith Sanctions

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 has made a sanctions recommendation.

A current and former Adorno & Yoss lawyer and their ex-client should pay nearly $312,000 to reimburse the defendants for their legal fees and costs in a hard-fought trade dress case, says U.S. Magistrate Judge Walter Johnson in a Jan. 29 report.

Judge Charles Pannell Jr. must now decide whether actually to impose the sanctions in the Northern District of Georgia case. The $312,000 represents a nearly 30 percent discount on the legal bill submitted by Stites & Harbison, writes the Fulton County Daily Report.

Pannell isn't likely to be overly sympathetic about the big legal bill: Cary Ichter, Guy Weiss, the law firm and their former client "blatantly misrepresented" the law and behaved with "dishonesty," he held in a Dec. 2 order. "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."

Responding by e-mail to a Daily Report request for comment, Ichter, who now heads his own Ichter Thomas law firm, expresses "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.