We filed a lawsuit against a well-known Philadelphia law firm for not honoring a written agreement to pay a referral fee for our client, another lawyer. Referral fees are a common practice, and the defendant law firm would not honor its own written agreement. The case is set for trial in April in the Philadelphia Court’s Commerce Program.
In my view, the written contract is clear and unambiguous, so no oral testimony is needed to interpret the contract. This was the key to the whole trial and, of course, the Defendant disagreed, and wanted to explain his way out of honoring his own written words. I also didn’t trust my adversary from bringing in inflammatory and irrelevant testimony at the trial, so I filed four pre-trial motions (called motions in limine) for the Court to rule on before the trial started.
I am pleased to report that on February 15, 2013, Judge McInnerny granted all four of my motions.
The most important of these orders precludes the defendant from introducing any oral testimony to give his version of the contract. Upon receiving these orders, I recalculated my settlement demands, and I expect the defendants to come to the table with a reasonable offer.
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