the more your honour's are underlying premise a straightforward an attorney fired for wrongful conduct is not entitled to quantum error the follow up between mr dobbs and counsel should precluded one american get to that counsel's wrongful conduct to breaching the contract at the rules and future duties were disregarded twice by the district dobbs has consistently press these issues and he again that mr dobbs former counsel should recover nothing at all there would have been no money to the rich with their if the panel thought there were any merit to that argument why would why would the panel of th consider the three issues that counsel raised in the first appeal which were excuse me the second third and fourth issue which was a breach of contract at the rules and future duties the original poet council framed the frame the appeal it framed framed the brief as first attacking the finding and then in the alternative argued you don't quote a marriage should be considered so so in that regard in that the panel's the friends your honors consider the first issue that was raised in the brief and was in the alternative right right your honor but bit at oral argument i know the council did did argue essentially that the case should be just completely tossed so in that regard even even if these issues were implicitly consider they're still incorporated in the quantum aaron elsa's and that is because these three breaches they explain why dobbs did what he did they this rate the notion that dogs try to cheat council or lie in wait to fire counsel or unfairly benefit from counsel's work yet the district court's decision and its decision again on re manned that was that these notions were the catalyst for the court's decision and with due respect to the district court its portrayal of events is exact opposite of what occurred counsel abandoned dogs after breaching the agreement to advance cost counsel then try to negotiate a new retainer with terms adverse to dobbs council's wing then thwarted dobbs from seeking new representation bus casting dobbs is the to take the settlement and became frustrated with mclaughlin that's it not a word about the events were sympathetic to break down the breaches or the e mails yeah she did say you're talking she came up with the same number yes your honor and i would i would say she did not for the reason being that she did not consider the context the backdrop of of what transpired there is that there's a very serious meri allegation that this contract was british and this is an argument again it's that was raised and has been preserved and the district court simply did not consider that and it's not just what the district court missed it in the wrongful conduct it's also what the court found the court found contrary to the seventh circuit that mr dobbs fired counsel and accepted the settlement five days later in reality and again as this court found it was five months the court also found that the  y disagree with that i believe in and i am not saying certainly i believe the dates were in there in the second decision so in that finding that that's what led that's what prompted the court conclusion that mr dobson ought to have all the benefits of counsel without payment that time frame of five days and that is again respectfully to the district court that's an abuse of discretion and these are significant mistakes them deal with attorneys they do the heavy lifting and they secure the settlement offer the pelleas never appeared in court never conducted discovery never engaged in motion practice and dabs ultimately accepted the settlement five months later only because he could not secure new representation to the lien and because the settlement window closed the following day so this case is an another reason to reverse how did dobbs benefit from council services they didn't get him the two hundred fifty thousand dollars on an offer they didn't get him the ninety five thousand dollars in advancements they didn't get him the likely would have done that pretty much the same amount of work i mean all of them were relying on lead counsel to do the heavy lifting in in this reap the benefit of the settlement negotiated by the council the differential settlement amounts for the represented in the un representative reason he hired counsel and hired this counsel was the the notion of the ultimate goal trial and whether he was misguided in that notion or not that was what he wanted and that was made clear in the original e mail and in that original e mail his concern is costs were the cost for a trial i'm going to have to be responsible for these costs so even from the beginning from the outset before the retainer was even signed that was his foremost concern and his concern was there laid by counsel saying don't worry about cost we're going to handle these these costs so so as far as what this council did i agree with with judge opener that at that point that was all really what counsel was was there to do and n t l the lead counsel was there to do the heavy lifting but at that point that was kind of that the put up or shut up moment mr dobbs wanted to proceed further and counsel it based on the board of eighty seven thousand five hundred and i'm wondering if the attorney hours expended on these peels now outstrip the value of the disputed an entirely valid concern and i understand that concern and you're probably right in it unfortunately i know the court lolo's attorney fee disputes especially when it's here twice but this this is a matter of principle mr dobbs he sustain these significant injuries and he really believed he had a chance to go to trial and these there's some astronomical verdicts that are that are coming down in these cases or is it a billion dollar verdict the six plaintiffs another two hundred forty seven million dollars verdict to some other planet so i mean there there is there was in endgame here that mr dobbs head and again i  think it's the broken promise the e mail that says don't worry we're going to advance costs and then it's smacks of a bait and switch so that that's our concern may please the court counsel i want to address that last issue  first i'm a trial lawyer i've tried over one hundred cases and one of the few attorneys in this country the try to hit case to verdict after six weeks and four hundred thousand dollars of expenses we got a big verdict in my assessment of this case i thought it was foolish for mr dobbs not to accept the settlement which he ultimately did except actually went to the one to pew a s r trial that occurred here in chicago and watch part of it it was a defense for it now we're talking about things that aren't in the decision in the record of the district court the diff appellant is trying to use this  forum to have a trial on whether or not i as the attorney for the what we call the mclachlan group of attorneys in this case because a change firms were trying to use this as a venue to have the trial on what gee did i reach a contract did i violate ethics there's no finding in the record anywhere here that any of that happens matter of fact if this was remanded we did up with the same or more that's not part of the claim here but i want to tell you why i am here because this isn't just mikey my co counsel with the arab oil stock he left a widow and two small children he gets part of this fee and i'm going to fight for that fee as far as we have to fight for that even though it may not be worth my time this is my fifth trip to chicago to argue in front of a district court or an appellate court this fifty we also had a trip to toledo where we mediated feet with that now deceased judge handle the m t l what counsel wants to argue though is that unless you're the lead counsel then you didn't earn a fee representing anybody in a multi district litigation i put in my affidavit which is quite long while my experience what isn't in my affidavit other it does say that i worked on did to pew a s r multi district litigation i was on the discovery committee i review tens of thousands of pages of documents probably a few hundred hours of time none of that is my time for mr dobbs that's the work i do on a case that's part of the expertise i brought here to mr dobbs we found mr do case if we didn't the statue of limitations would have expired and he wouldn't have had a claim unless he found someone else to take his case which he probably would have on the same terms that we took mr dobbs case didn't benefit from what i did because if we had not found his case and he didn't have an attorney and he had just done this all on his own he would be what the settlement agreement calls unrepresented claiming that an represented claimant got seventy two thousand five hundred dollars less than representing claimants and obvious purpose of that is because representing claimants were not to be penalize compared unrepresented claim opinion your honor that he did not qualify for an enhancement under the schedule but i am no uncertain terms told him i would pursue the enhancement and it isn't a matter of advocacy in the end to pugh settlement whether you  an enhancement or not it's a matter of the settlement facility looks at the records and they say do you or do you not qualify i always told mr dobbs that i would pursue the enhancement for him but nonetheless i put him in a posture that if he didn't roll in the settlement that he would be eligible to then make the claim for the enhancement we had all the records to do that we had collected the records we were going to i was going to do that for him but i'm not claiming any fee for that to bring up this enhanced meant it shouldn't even be before this court in part because there's no real evidence in the record that he even got an enhanced but he's given us an affidavit saying he talked to somebody at the settlement facility who said he would probably be entitled to ninety five thousand dollars there's nothing in this record yet i've seen that says he even gets the and he answered it i hope he does this if he's entitled to it he should get it but that's not in the record before the court i think  appear in a record that fifty hours no i didn't keep part time records of the time i spent so i do not going to manufacture them after the fact i didn't have time records for the time spent from march first i found my new firm until whatever the date is that i was discharged because it still is unclear when that was the october date that council likes to refer to the disc the united states district court was never given a paper saying i was discharged as counsel the paper that mr dobbs filled out in october was something sent to the settlement facility which is in the record where he said he wanted to  change his primary counsel and he listed my firm as the counsel that had been his primary counsel and then he didn't list anybody as the substitute counsel that's not a filing in the united states district court he went back and forth a few times in one of the one of the documents in the record is the e mail from mr jobs to me where i continued to tell me look i'm going to take care of you and lessen until you get other counsel or we otherwise resolved this and he wrote to me  it's document eight thirty in document number seventeen until we can resolve this matter you are still my attorney in this protecting my rights case except for and that stated the fourth of april two thousand and fourteen and i  continued to do that until he filed in the united states district court northern district of ohio a paper a letter saying that he wanted to be pro se i then properly filed a motion to withdraw which was required by judge katz and judge katz granted the motion i protected his interests until then i did what i was supposed to do to protect mr dobbs  more facts and evidence in what if any should be awarded as a quantum erowid fee she did what the law required to cite the key versus sullivan case in the united states versus barnes case in our papers the lead attorney on the and i was not a lead attorney on the m d l but if if what mr dobbs has done here is going to be sanctioned then anybody who has a case in a multi district litigation and we're talking literally hundreds of thousands of cases around the federal system in the united states right now anybody once a settlement is announced can fire their counsel and claim all we know is a few hundred dollars of an hourly rate times whatever hours they can document in this case that's not how contingen cases work that people do what i did you get a few clients and you work for all of those clients sign understand i'm just done with what the judge put in her findings that's why i didn't when i read it i knew i was his lead attorney as you had no time left but you says show seven seconds you may have a minute once again the email informing dobbs that cost would be advanced is the kind of voided like the plague like it was in the in the briefs in the end our position is extremely simple counsel promise to advance cos when gods ask counsel to make good on their promise counsel broken this is wrongful conduct and this impacts if not precludes quantum error but there is nothing further thank you for your time