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Business Litigation
The litigation attorneys at Ellis, Li & McKinstry have a broad range of experience in state and federal court successfully handling business and commercial disputes. Our clients include corporations, partnerships, nonprofit organizations, and individuals. Whether representing the plaintiff or handling the defense, our goal is to efficiently resolve the dispute in a just manner, consistent with the client's objectives, and to do so with minimum interference to the client's ongoing operations.
ELM lawyers who practice business litigation law:
Representative matters:
- We defended a federal lawsuit claiming that our client illegally broadcast the Oscar De La Hoya title fight in September 2002. The case was settled for $4,000 in nuisance value in a suit seeking over $100,000 statutory F.C.C. damages.
- When our client's business partner left their small technology company, the parties settled on how the debt and assets would be shared. Unfortunately, after separation, the former partner was dissatisfied and demanded that our client protect him from company debt that the former partner had agreed to carry. The former partner sued and our client responded with counterclaims for actions the former partner took after leaving the company, which our client had previously been willing to forgive. We were prepared and confident in our case, but our client understood the unavoidable costs and risks inherent in a jury trial, so he offered to pay his former partner a generous sum to settle at mediation. The former partner refused the offer and we went to trial. At trial, we reconstructed the history of the partners' negotiations and the Jury agreed with our client's position on all issues, resulting in a verdict and financial award in our client's favor. After the court awarded attorney fees, our client's judgment against his former partner was nearly as much as the former partner had demanded that our client pay. Our client tried to do what was right and generous at all points in the case, but when his opponent would not be reasonable, we were successful in getting a court agree with our client's position.
- Our client had a customer based in Chicago, which refused to pay for over a million dollars of services our client had provided to them. The customer made promises upon promises, but followed through on none of them. Even while we worked to try to reach a resolution out of court, the customer continued with excuses and trumped up charges of breach of contract by our client. We took the fight to them and filed our complaint in the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. As the litigation progressed, we discovered fraud and deception by this customer that steeled our client's resolve to see justice done. Ultimately, with the assistance of the federal Magistrate Judge, we were able to negotiate a fair settlement and to collect the full settlement sum from this former customer. When right matters, we are prepared to take our client's fight to any court in the country.
- Our client invested millions of dollars with a merchant banker who supposedly had a great reputation. But when our client asked deeper questions about how the money was invested, the merchant banker had few answers. The money was gone. That's when the client got us involved. We sued the merchant banker for securities fraud and obtained an $11,000,000 judgment against his company and himself individually. We then successfully defended the judgment when the defendant appealed to the Court of Appeals and sought review by the Supreme Court. At the same time, we unveiled the defendant's attempts to hide assets offshore. Although other defrauded investors settled for small sums or chose to not even sue, we obtained a significant recovery for our client.
- Our client, a software engineer, was the first employee of a start-up company that managed databases in the commercial mail and voting industries. He applied his technical expertise during long hours and under stressful conditions because his employer promised to share the sale proceeds if the company ever made it big enough to attract a large purchaser. But when the big sale finally occurred, the employer chose to keep all the money to himself. We sued for breach of the employer's promises. After a week-long trial, a jury agreed that our client was wronged and awarded him $500,000.
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