for fees and costs and imposed sanctions against the defendants under rule sixteen a half of the much money are we talking about we are talking about right i think it's four thousand two hundred fifty six dollars which is the actual when it used sixteen f to sanction us for our conduct in this settlement conference and the language in particular that was used was this idea that we were we did not engage in or said time we full handed communication from the defendants was lacking in the week between the telephone conference and the actual settlement conference in the part that i struggle with is i think reasonable being sanctioned just because i was i was perhaps too timely candid and fulsome during the telephone conference when i offered to the best of my knowledge what the some of the talks have been in the past when the court asked so what happened here was we had a telephone conference sat about two three weeks prior to the beginning of the trial there had been a couple of formal some conferences with the magistrate which had been unsuccessful in the year since the last summit conference to the best of our knowledge the plaintiffs to me and remained over a million dollars some of it wasn't even in the in our minds stephen think about we got a notice that we were to participate in a telephone conference without any indication as to what the topic of the telephone conference was going to be and you were in were you surprised that the topic of settlement came up well not necessarily begin with virtually it's always on the agenda right in a civil case it is but the way that the previous my understanding of the previous set of the conferences the way they had broken down we had any issues so i had not spoken to my client about my either the insurance company or the defendants about how they felt about any sort of settlement when judge reinhardt asked about what had happened in the past regarding settlement counsel for the plaintiff said they think they weren't able to speak to it with any clarity at that particular point time i had not been involved in either of the two prior some conferences but i tried to give judge reinhart what i thought was the accurate facts regarding what had transpired council let me just ask you procedurally what we're doing here because we have a situation in which the district judge made his decision about facts that occurred in front of him yesterday with a telephone conference and then with some us i haven't seen an argument that factual findings were  that any conflicting evidence was offered well you know what i think is i believe the factual findings were only as when you try to apply them to sixteen f because i don't see how any is a factual argument or legal or is legal or ok the facts are the facts what we said we did say i'm not denying that any of these conversations took place when i am saying is that when you apply the facts to rule pretty clearly that you all were willing to consider an offer in the one hundred fifty thousand dollars range he agreed with and i disagree with that that's what the district judge found isn't it i believe that is what the district  what are the only thing i said during this the telephone conference was that some point in time in the past here it comes i i was of the understanding and the conversation between the plaintiff who was pro se at the time and a representative of the end of the insurance company had taken place in which there was a discussion in the neighborhood of one hundred fifty thousand dollars which was rejected that ok so you signal that there had been an offer in that range plaintiff's counsel said we never heard that number before that's a promising basis for discussion i'm i'm paraphrasing here perfectly understandable how everybody would react to it that way so the judge says let's have a settlement conference you're perfectly entitled to change your mind about things right in the judge made that clear but she was upset because you needed to let him know what the plaintiffs know no you weren't ready to go forward on that basis that kind of backing up is permissible but the timing of it wasted everybody's time in the plaintiff's money i know it's hard for me to see an abuse of discretion here i guess i fail to see how it wasted the plaintiffs time we didn't come to the settlement conference without the proper people with authority to settle a case owes you had signaled a willingness to offer in the range of one hundred fifty thousand now you don't have to do that you don't have to follow through on that but you know what you do wind up wasting people's time if you're just going to repeat the offer that had been rejected a year year and a half earlier of sixty thousand and again in that telephone conference to have a judge reinhart i did not suggest a possibility of settlement at one hundred fifty a gator how else would you interpret the mention of that number you from prior discussions saying that it had been rejected that's a clear signal that something on that order had been offered before correct i believe it had been offered then you maybe you were mistaken ok i don't we don't know but that's a clear signal judge reinhardt is an experienced judge and manager of settlement negotiations he understood that pla that's a basis for going forward and the vice thing i want to do a week before trial starts is get on the wrong side of judge reinhart at a settlement office trip so judge brown heard a granted summary judgment in this case long ago and it had been reversed i assume that the judge reinhardt would be happy that we came with any money but he might be thinking this is due counsel in the plaintiff's counsel's opportunity to get out of a case which doesn't look good for them early on without them having expended much in the way of fees or time and might put some money into mr cain's pocket quite honestly that we can't we offered sixty thousand dollars from conference and that was sixty thousand dollars more then the jury felt the case was worth because they came with a not guilty verdict at the end of the trial so i guess i just i never  evidentiary hearing and more explicit findings you know i think the order should be reversed because it was an incorrect legal standard when we look at the if a judge applies an incorrect legal standard i don't think he did it but if he does then we would need to give him an opportunity to apply the correct legal standard to the facts right and if that is the case then you know you seem to want to be disputing some of the facts in your appellate paid hers without actually testifying settlement and as we just heard the defendant abate representations about prospects of settlement they were numbers that plaintiff had not heard to date in fact it was significantly higher than what plaintiff it heard in the last failed settlement conference about a year prior to that day and based on those representations both the court and the party started be fruitful to have a selma conference which the court's scheduled for the following week at rockford illinois plaintiffs took time out of their trial preparation schedule to prepare for the settlement conference plaintiff's counsel drove from chicago to rockford and plaintiff himself had to drive from michigan to rockford the night before and stay in a hotel in order to be at the settlement conference the next morning yet when we got to the settlement that the they changed the position settlement or didn't come with a certain number the issue was that they presented a certain settlement range which induced the parties just weeks before trial to to suspend their tr notably the court gave three weeks for the defendants to respond and they had more than ample opportunity to submit affidavits or declarations from their attorneys from the other individual defendants from their insurance adjuster or anyone else who would have given explanation as faith in the settlement conference and and as a result the courts allow defendants present evidence of their good faith participation and defendants failed to present adequate information they had every opportunity to present information well what do you think the defendant and therefore you may not want to have enough self confidence that enough yeah i believe so in that case if they were to say that you know our range was grossly misstated it's not as if they were within a few thousand dollars or close to something like that so yeah would injured yeah and so you know if they would have just informed of their change of position evan could have thought better and said you know maybe this will be fruitful and there are a lot of settlement conferences turn out to be unfruitful but some of them are more pointless than others ye proceedings and in had firsthand knowledge of the tone and demeanor on both the status conference and also what occurred in the settlement conference and so it also i guess if a if defendant wanted to ogmund the record because there are no transcripts of the proceedings they could have used federal help procedure ten c to recreate a transcript based on the recollections which would have had to been approved by the trial court judge to be on the record today and they also failed to do that so defendants had every opportunity  to put evidence into the record to support that syncs without warrants and they failed to do so and they did not they have not and they cannot meet their burden that the judge was clearly erroneous in this factual findings or that he abused  support of our view word in it it details all of our expenses in notably we didn't even include all the attorney time we're trying to be a very judicious in what we'd submit to the court so it was actually grossly lower than the actual attorney time spent on the matter so i keep hearing that the numbers were way off or grossly different and i just i have to disagree what we did in that when we were setting up in the first telephone conference it was plaintiff's counsel who expressed interest in having an actual settlement conference that was judge reinhart expressed interest in having a settlement conference i had no idea yet at that moment whether we had the availability of the people from the insurance company or my clients from the school district we managed to get them all together and get to the settlement conference and the the fact that we did not come in at the same number that i had talked about do what we had in this case was eight but pending punitive damages count against the two individual defendants the superintendent of the school district in the principal and so there was a lot of communication between the defendant themselves in the insurance company regarding what they were going to do with these of the settlement so how is it correct the sanctions were only forty two hundred dollars it is it is in the forty two to forty three hundred dollars range why don't you want to litigate something when the order came out first of all when judge wright heard sent out the sewer spot they dock it saying that they could file a motion for fees and costs after the trial i was very surprised by that i thought judge wright have understood what was happening i  ht when we were still heading up the right for even when i found out i was only going to have sixty thousand dollars i still thought judge reiner would be on our side considering he had found that there was no question of material fact and denied so or granted summary judgment us long ago and then had been reversed on appeal that's why we were going to trial i thought he would be happy to try to work the case if i wanted to negotiate directly with the plaintiff we could have just called and said hey guess what we're going to will offer you a sixty thousand dollars to settle a case that had worked in the past judge reinhardt and not been involved in any of the prior settlement conferences that had been the magistrate and i thought judge wright heard might come in and see if he couldn't get plaintiff to take whatever it was we were offering which i thought was more than the zero the judge reinhardt had given when he granted summary judgment in the case so the reason why i am here litigating this case is because i don't think i did anything wrong and i think there's a chilling effect when i am being sanctioned for not being using a kindly full some and candid communication which is exactly what i tried to do which you know i understand why you don't want to have the sanctions on your record that's that's perfectly