Opinion ID: 597429
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The New-Contract Contention

Text: 35 In pursuit of his contention that Mar Oil had agreed to a contingent-fee arrangement, Morrissey argues, relying on testimony by Spyrou, that Mar Oil had agreed to pay Morrissey on the basis of a 'subjective formula' the parties would apply 'at the end of the day' to arrive at a 'fair fee' that gave due weight to the 'amount of the settlement' and 'actual result.'  (Morrissey brief on appeal at 20.) Even without countervailing testimony, it would be within the prerogative of the trier of fact to refuse to believe that a client had agreed to so amorphous an arrangement. Here, in addition, there was contrary testimony from Monzon. He testified that when Morrissey requested a contingency arrangement at the outset, he rejected that request in part because before he even hired Morrissey Mar Oil had received a multimillion dollar offer of settlement from New Hampshire; Monzon could see no reason to agree to share that with newcomers: 36 [F]rom the very beginning, even the conversation, we say that we were not interested at all in that, in that type of agreement because first, we had already hired top firm lawyers in Spain, and secondly, very recently before that I was offered a settlement proposal with a 20 percent reduction, and looks to me not very clever to accept afterwards a proposal where I was giving up the 33 percent. 37 The decision to credit the testimony of Monzon over that proffered by Morrissey was well within the court's province as factfinder, and its finding that Mar Oil had never entered into the alleged contingent-fee arrangement was hardly clearly erroneous.