Attorneys fee clauses – where did we leave off last week? Well, we had a list of issues and only explored the first two. Here’s the list. If you want to see what we’ve written thus far, click HERE.

To make this page “look good” and match the look of prior blog postings, we’ve got to do some “fill-in” text. So, this is a good opportunity to thank our large audience of readers, many of them fervent followers of Ruminations. With today’s posting (our 151st to date), we’ve broken through the “150” barrier. All of our prior posting are available and our crude search feature might get you to explore some topics you never thought could be topics. So, here’s a big THANK YOU, and  the end of our segue to the list of issues we promised in the paragraph directly above. Keep your comments and your ideas for future postings coming this way.

And now, here’s that list: [Read more…]

Attributed to George Bernard Shaw is this (perhaps variant) observation: “The English and the Americans are two peoples divided by a common language.” So, there should be no surprise to experienced readers that, when it comes to the right to collect attorneys fees, there is the “English Rule” and there is the “American Rule.”

Those two rules simply reflect different philosophies or “public policies.” Under the English Rule, losers pay the winner’s attorneys fee under the policy that, if your claim could not be sustained, the party you claimed against should be returned to where it stood before the suit was filed. The American Rule, fully cognizant of the “fairness” goal of the rule from across the ocean, says that, absent fraud on the party of the one charged or a [Read more…]