A plaintiff was sued by a company for an alleged intellectual property violation and said that the violation had cost it millions in a lost contract. The party who broke the contract had a similar (but not exactly the same) surname as the plaintiff, but our client could not link them.

We found that the two were brothers who spelled their names differently, and that the plaintiff had attempted similar lawsuits with previous companies in other states. He had been called a fraudster by other judges and had millions in outstanding judgments filed against him. Once confronted with our findings, he dropped his case and our client paid nothing. Our bill was $4,200.

We managed to crack this case in about twelve hours.

A search for the plaintiff in newspapers was a potentially endless task because of his common name. We combined searches of his name and the various cities he had lived in. We had to fine-tune the searches to get rid of local baseball players with the same name. On the third city back from where he was living at the time, we came upon an obituary of his father, naming the plaintiff and his brothers as survivors. One of the brothers was the party who broke the contract, with his differently spelled name and the city he still lived in at the time of the case.

After that, we looked at the plaintiff’s litigation history not just in the state in which our case took place, but in all the states in which he had lived. He turned out to have defrauded others using identically named companies established in a variety of states.

Once presented with the evidence that we were aware of his fraud and his outstanding judgments, he settled the case for zero dollars and a promise that our side would not counterclaim for fraud.