Contact me at markploftus@aol.com

Approached today by a business consultant who thinks he got screwed out of a rather large fee by a big conglomerate here in the midwest. My client signed a deal with the defendant whereby he agreed to secure millions of dollars of financing for the company - in exchange for a monthly fee and a small % of the financing if and when it went through. The agreement provides that my client is to use his best efforts to get the financing and more importantly a tail clause. In effect, the tail clause basically says, "Hey, I have approached ABC Bank about giving you financing. I have given them docs and pitched your company to them. If you fire me and they go ahead and provide the financing up to 12 months after my firing, I still get paid". The big conglomerate says sure, no problem, we can live with that and signs off on it. So my client romances this Houston Bank about the financing. Sends them documents about the conglomerate, pitching them to the bank. Then, suddenly, my client is mysteriously fired. And then all kinds of weird "coincidences" start to occur. First, the conglomerate suddenly manages to get some financing. Millions of dollars of financing. And they get the financing shortly after they fire my client. And in an extraordinary coincidence, happen to get it from the Houston bank my client had been romancing for the money. Now isn't that an odd series of events. And the kicker? By firing my client, the conglomerate thinks they don't have to pay any fee for using one of his sources. But they forgot about the 12 month clause in the contract. So I agreed to represent this guy and go after his fee, which is well into the six figures. The defense here will essentially be hey, we lined this up ourselves, with no help from your guy. But the fact the money came from a source my client had previously approached combined with the odd timing of it all suggests that somebody was trying to pull a fast one. I will be filing the lawsuit in the next couple of weeks. This should be an interesting case. I'll report on it as things unfold.

Interesting article about our noble attorney general in this month's Vanity Fair. Has "voluntary" prayer meetings in his office every day at the Justice Department. It has been nearly 20 years since I got out of law school, but I think that whole separation of church and state thing is still part and parcel of our government. I'll have to check. Maybe they got rid of that one day when I was napping.

Finally, a quick celebrity note. Seems Courtney Love is being sued by a law firm for neglecting to pay some $200,000 in legal fees. And she seemed like such a responsible gal...