Given the tremendous size of the award, we assumed that Ringgenberg, after firing Chester, must have then pushed him out a window.
SHOOT: Firing your legal counsel is a good (bad) first step towards this outcome.
It gets worse. After Judge McDonald set a hearing date, Ringgenberg wrote a letter saying, in essence, "I'm not going to show up." With no information forthcoming from Ringgenberg, Judge McDonald had to rely on scarce data on the financial situation of iFreedom, an Internet communications company. "[McDonald] applied adverse inferences against the defendant, essentially filling in the gaps in the story presuming it would come out in favor of the plaintiff," Young said in the Q&A. "That was really where the numbers started to scale," he told the NLJ.
Then came the punitive damages award, which essentially tripled the commission award. "It's unusual you would triple a $1 billion award, but clearly the arbitrator was going to make a point," Young said.
We're going to guess that when Ringgenberg saw the size of the award, he just about choked on his Crunch 'n Munch, too. |
clipped from www.law.com
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