I suppose within the last few years the most common contract disputes I’ve handled have been lease disputes, commercial leases.

Within the last three or four years, I’ve had as many as 11 lease disputes pending in the Southern District of Texas, involving projects down there that one of my main clients had.

We had to win those cases. They were contract disputes; they were obligations that the landlord had that was not fulfilling. And so we sued them, and they mustered a huge fight because the landlord had sold these leases to a REIT, a real estate investment trust, and they’ve got deep pockets.

And so that was kind of what we did. We did that lawsuit, and we won those cases.

Other cases involve someone who is hired to be a representative of an entity in Australia, for example. This is one of my cases to develop facilities in the United States.

And so my client went out and bought real estate property around the United States, and then the company in Australia told him that they weren’t going to reimburse them for those acquisitions because they were in financial straits.

So we sued them. We took him to a jury trial here in Maricopa County. We ended up with a 60 million dollar judgment against them after the jury trial.

So they filed insolvency in Australia, and then I end up in the bankruptcy courts in Wilmington, Delaware, where they’re trying to have a foreign insolvency proceeding recognized by the bankruptcy courts in the United States.

So we had to fight that up there because no one ever heard of an insolvency—international insolvency. You don’t hear about those very often.

So there were evidentiary hearings that went on with that, and I learned something again about large law firms in that case that people should understand. In the bankruptcy court, I only do adversary proceedings.

Adversary proceedings in this Equitable Court, which is a bankruptcy court, it’s not an Article III court. They don’t really apply the Rules of Evidence as strictly as they do in an Article III court—that’s a United States District Court that you think of as a district judge at the courthouse.

So what they do for direct examinations in these types of cases, the other side typically prepares an affidavit and they submit it to the judge, and they did in this case. So the judge said our witness, of course, is in Brisbane, Australia. We had him remoted in here, but to save time, since it’s 2 A.M. in Brisbane right now, we’ll just use this declaration as our direct examination, and Mr. Williams may now cross-examine the witness.

The judge says, “Is that okay with you, Mr. Williams?” I said no. I don’t want to cross-examine an affidavit; I want him to ask his client questions.

So the judge looked at the lawyer who was from One Rockefeller Plaza in downtown New York. He had four lawyers with him and two paralegals. He said, “Well, John, your honor, that’s not the way we typically do that in bankruptcy court.”

He says, “Well, we don’t typically do that because the other lawyer agrees, but Mr. Williams is not agreeing, so you need to do direct examination on your client.”

Now, this is a lawyer charging twelve hundred dollars an hour, really experienced, from a prestigious law firm, who began to ask questions. I began objecting, and the judge was sustaining every one of my objections.

Finally, the lawyer said, “Well, your honor, I’ve never done a direct examination before.”

And the judge says, “And you’re not doing a very good job. That’s why I’m sustaining Mr. Williams’s objections. Maybe one of those other lawyers with you can ask a question that’s correct.”

So you got to be careful about what you’re getting or what happens in the courtroom, even with a large law firm. And by the way, I won that case. We then ended up with ancillary proceedings here in Arizona.

Now, did we collect anything? No. We got offsets for claims they had against us because they truly did go insolvent, and unfortunately, there wasn’t money to collect. But I have on my wall right here an award that was given to me by the State Bar for having one of the largest jury verdicts in Arizona that year.

So those are typical of the sorts of cases that I do. They’re very complex. They often involve constitutional issues, contract issues, nuances, those sorts of things that happen.