About » A Mistake to Avoid
In my experiences, I also made my share of mistakes. A big one, which fortunately worked out in the end, was purchasing property with an unknown environmental condition.
The seller delivered a phase one environmental report to me, but it turned out to be, shall we say, less than accurate. I was forced to take legal action, eventually going to trial for eight days in U.S. Federal Court. I was told at the time that only 300 civil cases a year end up in Federal Court in the United States. Thus, this was a unique experience, particularly in that I had a stake.
There was a point where it became evident I was almost surely going to win damages and attorneys fees, and perhaps more, which I’ll get to, but I needed to front considerably more legal expense to improve my chances most optimally. There may be no greater legal lesson than that experience.
In the end, I won, handily. The judge, today a Harvard Professor and a frequently appearing legal expert on national news programs, referred to the defendant as a “dogged bumbler” in her written verdict. How awesome is that? Regretfully, however, this “dogged bumbler” reference would go on to essentially explain that the defendant wasn’t competent enough to be outright fraudulent. Consequently, although I won damages, attorney’s fees, and interest, I did not get up to the three times damages I might have been able to receive had the defendant been ruled fraudulent.
This all worked out for me in the end, and along the way I learned some great lessons about commercial real estate and the legal system in general. Given that I believe the all in costs of all this to my opponent in this case was 8 times what I knew I would have settled for early on, 100 times his best offer before I filed suit, and 40 times the amount of a credit he received from a contractor early on “to leave some stuff” that I came to understand created the problem to begin with, one might say that I learned as much about another’s mistakes as that of my own.
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