Robert Burns, 1759-1796
Update (December 7, 2016): The original post, below, highlights the inherent and dramatic uncertainty of the course of civil litigation. I recently discovered that the saga continues.
Minneapolis law firm, Nilan Johnson Lewis (“NJL”) is sitting on a pile of money ($2,300,653.64) related to the settlement of the underlying lawsuit but the handful of litigants who believe they are entitled to some or all of the proceeds cannot agree on the split. I note that the NJL client, ECTG was originally sued for allegedly defaulting on a $2.4 million promissory note and, in the end, seems to have netted rather than paid the same amount (minus legal fees and the cost of illiquid frozen assets). Something obviously went quite agley.
Original post (April 8, 2014): In 1785, Scotsman Robert Burns’ plow ran over a mouse’s nest, causing the poet to give some thought to our intertwined lives unwittingly upsetting the lives of others. “The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley,” he wrote. Over the years, we have revised the line to say, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
Nowhere is this more true than in civil litigation. A straight-forward action to enforce unpaid promissory notes appears to have spawned a whole new lawsuit claiming conspiracy, for example.
Young et al. v. ECTG (D. Minn.) and ECTG v. O’Shaughnessy, et al, (D. Minn.) revolve around a complicated tale spanning half the globe (between Minnesota and Ireland) and it appears that Irish ECTG, doing business as “TrustWater,” got some needed capital from executives/shareholders in TrustWater’s U.S. affiliate, has had trouble repaying the notes as agreed, and members of the U.S. affiliate went their own way to form “CleanSmart.”
There are two lawsuits because ECTG tried and failed to raise its claims in the second lawsuit as counterclaims and third-party claims in the first lawsuit but those efforts were defeated this past week.
From this distance, it is impossible to tell whether Young et al. saw this table-turning counter-offensive from the get-go.
Burns’ poem to the mouse concludes that the mouse and the man face pretty much in the same existential challenge. The only difference is that the mouse is fortunately ignorant of past and future, the poet says.
Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!