$58,000 Summary Adjudication For Unpaid Legal Fees Sustained On Appeal.
An in pro per former client, as a defendant, represented himself in former law firm’s action to recover from him $58,000 in unpaid legal fees. Although there was an arbitration clause in the fee retainer agreement, defendant answered (never listing arbitration as a defense) and never requested mandatory fee arbitration. Plaintiff law firm obtained a summary adjudication on its contract claim. Defendant then filed a motion for judgment on the pleadings raising the arbitration provision as barring adjudication of the matter in court. The common counts were moot based on the contract adjudication, and a final judgment was entered in favor of law firm.
Defendant’s appeal was unsuccessful in O’Neil, LLP v. Dorado, Case No. G053571 (4th Dist., Div. 3 Aug. 2, 2017) (unpublished). Justice Bedsworth, author of the 3-0 opinion, agreed with the trial court’s conclusion that a motion for judgment on the pleadings was an improper vehicle to raise the arbitration issue—a petition to compel arbitration was the correct way to go about it, compounded by the fact defendant waived arbitration by litigating for a while. Defendant also suggested that the action was time barred, but he presented no evidence of when law firm’s representation was finished such that defendant failed to bear his burden of proof on the statute of limitations defense.
NOTE: "Although we recognize that, as a non-lawyer, he faces a daunting task in trying to negotiate a path through the byways of legal procedure," the Court admonishes, "the same rules and standards that apply to attorneys apply to him, and those rules were not followed here."