court my name is stephen bach i represent the defendants appellants in this case to begin this action is it's an action for money damages at its core the players are seeking to recover under three dollars separate a filed an answer to the complaint instead they filed a motion to dismiss which the complaint and then a response to the motion for permanent injunction which incorporated the arguments in the motion to dismiss legally because of the failure of the agreements the alleged free sharing rooms to comply with rule one five of the rules of professional conduct those were and that would be under both missouri and illinois as well so under valuable it's back it was for that was going to proceed for an average year hearing on the emotion the court also i would point out when you look at the october th two thousand and twenty order it was injured granting the motion for a preliminary injunction the court did indicated page three noted that the defendants offered no evidence presented no witnesses of their own and didn't even cross examine all the witnesses so ultimately with the court based its ruling on was one sided presentation of evidence proceeding to have a chair here when one was not appropriate or warranted because there was no material issues of fact and what was being challenged was the legal sufficiency of the complaints in the  will take her st when you look at all three of the contracts she never signed the contract jenner took no obligations under that contract she wasn't a party to it but she was assume joint financial responsibility if the evidence you're hearing itself claiming to have or never testified that she assumed joint financial responsibility it most that she said of the closer she got was sort of a vague answer to a obligations may or may not of been certainly there was no assumption of joint responsibility in the case and that in and of itself is fatal to the claim of enforcing the fish sharing agreement under a one point referenced named so those agreements rada were looking only for breach of contract to st contract the obvious to two thousand and fourteen agreements and that agreement was alternately again is conceded by the of the clients as a matter of public policy has an absolute right to terminate in agreement and select their voyage on termination contract is terminated the contingency term is terminated as well a corporation which was also side of him briefs and now the situation where three law firms agreed to represent some clients who agreed to take fifteen percent of the recovery but again in that situation there was no distinction of delineation much each say and that's the situation we have here with the st contracted just allocated fifty percent of the recovery to plaintiffs on hansie when you look at the contracts that are exhibits b and c to the  therefore violates one point fifty two dollars of the court and its ruling did point out and make the tempted to make a distinction with the distinction essentially without any merit but argue that the reason that law points and in those situations it there was no evidence prolife of any of the repertoire harm there was fear there was speculation that the family could do this or may move money or could move out of state or could retire  actual facts or evidence of any specific harm the court also noted in its order specifically that this was an action for money damages there was an adequate room in the that this was not ongoing harm and even clancy st of all i just want to point out i know everybody knows this but the council did not address the issue of abuse of discretion i mean the court is entitled to a lot of discretion on these facts and sounded very much like an argument on summary judgment saying i didn't like the way the court dealt with that but putting that aside on the other natural hearing i'd like to court to consider the fact that in the motion to dismiss these are all mr brown actually a twelve page af davit which note for note disputed the allegations in the underlying complaint they then attended a hearing where we agreed to temporarily escrow the money while we resolve deep titian t r the  motion against the t r o and the petition for plenary injunction at that hearing the court told us to exchange all exhibits we were going to use at that hearing and in fact mr brown attached something like one hundred and thirty eight  of e mails and texts which he reserve the right to use at the hearing we sent them forty pages of e mails and other documents which we did use at the hearing so this wasn't a surprise and if you go to the hearing no and mr brown said all right and he proceeded and we cited curley for the proposition that once you do that you have waived your objection to the the taking of a hearing you can't participate in the hearing and they didn't cross examine they did submit evidence oh and by the way they submitted fight exhibits with their t r o which were the missouri pleadings and those things and he cited for those balls in the underlying case and in the briefs in this case so he's citing to evidence he's put in but saying we should have had an evidentiary hearing i submit that the affidavit his cooperation in the pleadings the change because it is and his participation in the hearing could cross examination of multiple witnesses and use of exhibits with those witness is it waiver of any objection to the proceeding going forward and you will not find anywhere in the transfer of his objection to moving forward on the hearing he did up preserve that in any way that i see with regard to rule one point five  i keep hearing about financial responsibility in there has to be an agreement but if you look at the storm and which i think started this said that financial responsibility means joint responsibility for malpractise coverage and paris made it clear that that did not have to be in writing illinois law you would be liable for malpractise if the attorney to whom you refer the case committed no practice so the financial responsibility argument is is i'd say just specious it's not it's not based on supreme court ruling with respect to the attorney's speech argument it's not just the contract the court relied on emails from the client and have the court noted writing under the supreme court rules can be at virtually any written or recordable media we introduced a number of e mails between brown and schroeder the client at the time not only talking about exhibit a in fact  her decision to cancel glances interest she outlines in detail her agreement an assessment of the original contract how it is divided up between the parties and testified that brown told her at the time she signed the contract and clancy said the same thing that the fee was going to be one dollar rd of all he ever fifty percent to brown in the remainder which was roughly seventeen percent would go to glance at it and so as you see in her email she's using those numbers and saying if the referring attorney is going to get ten and it comes out of the glance you'll hear her share steve's only in there for seven percent i don't think we need him so there's there's there's writing there with her clients agreeing to the referral fees in a then we go on to the client talking with brown about how about exhibit b and how they're going to enter into that and he pled out tells her i recommend  a rd but i don't normally put it in the contract which is exactly opposite of his position here and this is the theme here he says one thing to the client and then does something different or says something different he essentially tells the client i recommend  she agrees and says i would not have signed a contract if if he hadn't told me in writing that the was going to be a blur now mr brown is correct that when the core applied those facts he found that rule one point five was math but he is saying there's a question of fact as to whether one five was met and i think that's all he needs to do for the petition for injunctive relief we can move forward on the complaint quick note on five that yes the complaint was dismissed but it was not dismissed on subs and rounds the transcript makes it clear it was dismissed on six or three grounds for combining parties he estimates the untangle the parties that's not in the record but it has been done  note in the court decision he looked at a couple different factors he eat correctly cited the fact that equitable attachment was not favored in illinois but he pointed out that in attorneys these cases it was very common to treat that as an attorney as a now i've been looking at these cases and noting that where the court has found the specific on it does not seem the courts don't seem to address equitable remedy or other other means of recovering they seem to say where we have a specific bond related to a specific action here the attorney's fees a generated by the three counteracts the case underlying those three contracts that that money they typically don't address those two factors but the court here went on to to address brown's tonga it is not just plain just fear that he might do something with it the court pointed out and i don't know i believe this is a case that person pression least in my forty years i've never seen it where you have a c going behind the other counsel's back and telling the client that his co counsel is impaired by alcohol and drugs to the point where he is committing malpractise losing cases and clients are firing the firm these allegations were false and we submitted evidence to to show that some of these allegations were clearly false and testimony that but the client testified that is primarily what she relied on in terminating clancy's interest nice just to the court that as this court bounced someone in there you can say there's a breach of maturity or tortious interference when you slander a colleague falsely to get to get a client to fire them he then goes on to basically sanjay not he talks about jane oh hey we're having an obligation to make sure exhibits b and c were complied with fifteen well we haven't e mails where she asked for those contracts and he refuses to send them saying you are not an attorney on this case he tells her that he isn't she's not referring attorney at one point even though she clearly is he later says under missouri rules you can't be referring attorney which is correct but i really only rules you can and he says you can by the way he also told the client to be original contract they violated rule one point five because he and claims he were doing the work which is an incorrect statement of the law and he sent the client for one five which i'm not sure what the intent was there but the client didn't quite understand what was for going beyond that i'm multiple occasions he keeps telling jane and she's not the referring the ohave or she's not the referring attorney but yes the listener is the refreeze tourney and be telling the client it's going to be a rd but will decide that at the end of the case and she agrees to that and then basically doesn't communicate with anybody and he told the court that he found out from missouri that it was barred under missouri law but he didn't tell the client didn't tell the client he needed to amend the complaint didn't tell the client it and then goes on after he's applied to missouri it's not clear exactly when that happened he has a rd contract exhibits the sign that not only list a referring attorney but incorporates all of contract be in to see together listing her as a referring attorney and then as the case proceed to settlement distributed there is there is there is reason the court basically found that but for that happenstance conversation we would not have been able to file this case because essentially it would be after the fact and i think the court cites two curious way in other cases which says you know you really shouldn't use these things to undergo some thing you should preserve the status quo and so we filed this action because the money was in the trust account because it was still a segregated fund and this was the only time we could do it and when you talk about irreparable harm i think you can ignore the amount of that the involved in the forty five percent of the feed we're talking about is about three million dollars and then in this day and age money can be moved with the touch of a but this is not this is not a twenty thousand dollars deposit that can be recovered by other means so i think the court properly found that if you were strictly applying irreparable harm or inadequate remedy that there was another indication that a brown's misconduct and his d i mean the court didn't find him credible i mean it least at least he said h problematic and in every turn he found the other witnesses more credible on specific points than brown that's very unusual as well and i think you have to give weight to the court's he heard the testimony of the parties  testimony and he did not find brown as credible as the other witnesses but i think again going back to specific exception i think when you have a specific exception those other categories are not as critical to the binding that is all you're doing is preserving the status quo by preserving the fun i do want to mention the integration cause because mr brown did not but he may in in rebuttal of the integration cause yes they can be used in legal the supreme court says the agreements can be outside the contract that is the percentage the that each attorney is going to get to be outside the contract the integration clause bars the client from raising that that or bars anyone from raising the back t agreed in writing outside of the contract i think that is contrary to the rules of professional conduct i think that is contrary to the spirit of one point five and the letter of one five and i don't believe you can use integration clauses in that manner i i believe that the client email is permissive to explain that fifty percent and that those are ambiguous also as i said joint responsibility was in exhibit a that was listed and yes he argued we could use anything else to explain what they meant by joint responsibility as i've said i don't even think that was necessary but those ambiguities allow today with respect to exhibit b again i think the client agrees to a one hundred being an e mail with the attorney that is sufficient under eat to eat too and as a practical matter you can't use an integration clause to ban that because that's what the supreme court has said you can do the other thing and maybe mr buck will identify this but i'm not sure what legal opinion he is saying the court erred in i didn't see much in the court said there were mix questions of law in fact and the court found certain findings of fact based on the evidence you heard but i'm not sure what law what legal opinion the same is broken here but i believe the court correctly applied t law in this case in the hearing the ping in the court should be a bell thank you ruling and also i do have a question i'm sorry just because i have trouble stepping over the threshold here and maybe you can help me i understand what the court is saying but i do not believe you have to have pleadings i mean the nature of these petitions are that you probably don't have the underlying complaint completely resolved at the time you have a preliminary injunction leads to refile so none of the counts or by well they didn't survive in the sense the court asked me to read organize the complaint and that was done to be honest with you i believe that the court and i think the parties have been briefing the complaint that eventually was dismissed with leave the replevy but the grob aminah the amended complaint is the same as the original one that is we believe there was a breach pretty sure a beauty in the contract there was tortious interference with contract  that there was a violation or doing so the facts of the complaint are the same and they are the same in the amended complaint but if if that's an issue for the court i would gladly tender the amended complaint as an additional portion of the record for the court to consider because the underlying case is still moving on well i appreciate your input that helps me somewhat in understanding the order for you to hear so i appreciate your input but we thank  you thank you mr a mr buck for the bottle thank you there's a number of things i want to touch on st on the procedural history of this you know i'm i don't believe this statement that i objected to a continuance is an accurate statement or recollection is that i in fact set the hearing for the motion to dismiss on the same morning as the hearing on the  sherry agreement violated rule in point five we wanted to have a question for you about that in your original argument you said that you know both attorneys are responsible for making sure that there is an accurate  contract so there was no mention of mcnaughton in the referral and then when he in the non found out later through other means that the case had settled and contacted pfaff to ask about his referral fee and ultimately fast apologize for the oversight but the court ultimately ruled that the fact that it wasn't included in the agreement that it was an identified the referral itself in the fish area agreement that was fatal to any sharing agreements you you have an equal obligation to make sure that the underlying agreement complies with rule one point five he wanted me to and the it referring attorney could have entered into a separate arrangement with the client have to be in the same document writing when you read a lot of these cases there are multiple documents that even touches on the fact that one point made and i want to address that real quick the argument that somehow even on me why me assumption of joint financial responsibility was automatic that violates directly contrary to the opinion in fairest by the illinois supreme court basically the court said there's three things that must happen in the progression to remain orderly fashion and the st thing which is there must be an assumption of joint responsibility it doesn't have to be in writing so it doesn't have to be in that contract but there still must  later on november th the court they just added dismissed all of the counts mr ryan wants to argue that it was just a resorting to reorganization i do not believe that was the intent of the the court the judge said he wanted separate counts for each party so we could assess the others exactly it in fact that that point is driven home by the case of strata marketing versus murphy which i cited in the reply brief matt says even if and again i'm not going to get into it because we're out of time but i disagree this agree with the statement that i somehow waive the objection i think when you read the transcript that becomes clear but nonetheless even to the extent that i didn't stand on the motion to dismiss as mount waving the argument is to be attack on the legal sufficiency of the complaint unmask is