Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Cesiro
I cannot go into great detail here but I have to ask a basic question.
If someone sues me with a BS lawsuit and they loose, how do I go about recouping the 10's of thousands I had to spend in legal fees defending my self?
Is it automatic that a Judge will award me court costs or do I have to sue to get them recouped.
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What MRM said. Forget any claim based on "frivolous," you need to look to either a contractual provision that you have with the person which allows for recovery of attys fees, or a statute.
If you have a basis to recover attys fees, you don't need to sue to get an award. That would be done by motion.
As said above, if you win the suit, in most states you will get your "costs" back, but usually that does not include attys fees. Costs are usually not very much, they are things like your actual filing fees. If there were a lot of depos in the case, there are often significant recoverable costs for those.
When you get into any kind of litigation, you need to, up front, determine (1) whether you have grounds to get an award of attys fees if you win, AND (2) if you can get that award, whether you can actually collect it.
***If you are already deep into the lawsuit, your attorney should have already advised you of these issues, before you spent "tens of thousands of dollars." ***
You don't give the facts (although I think I remember some from other posts), but in a commercial business dispute, IMO you want to drain the emotion out of it and come to the strategy that makes the most *business* sense (i.e., not spending 10s of thousands to "prove a point" or for "the principle").