McClary v. Walsh

202 F.R.D. 286, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21444, 2000 WL 33407329
CourtDistrict Court, N.D. Alabama
DecidedJuly 25, 2000
DocketNo. CV-99-BU-1407-S
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 202 F.R.D. 286 (McClary v. Walsh) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, N.D. Alabama primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
McClary v. Walsh, 202 F.R.D. 286, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21444, 2000 WL 33407329 (N.D. Ala. 2000).

Opinion

DISCOVERY ORDER

PUTNAM, Chief United States Magistrate Judge.

This cause is before the court on the plaintiffs motion to compel discovery (Doc. 42), filed June 13, 2000, and referred to the undersigned on June 15, 2000. The principal issue is whether the requested discovery materials are shielded from disclosure because they fall within the attorney-client privilege claimed and asserted by defendants’ former clients Jimmy C. Parks, Jimmy D. Parks, and Parks & Sons Excavating, Inc. (referred to herein collectively as “Parks”).

Background

Plaintiff is a former client of the defendant attorneys.' He filed suit against them on several theories principally sounding in legal malpractice, breach of fiduciary duty, and fraud, arising out of transactions between him and Parks arranged by defendants. Without deciding the truth of the allegations, plaintiff alleges that defendants had long represented Parks and had represented him in unrelated matters. One of the matters in which defendants represented Parks was a lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company that had the potential to be quite lucrative. Defendants were aware that Parks was experiencing financial problems that could lead to bankruptcy and the loss of the Ford litigation. Following the collapse of the sale of the business to Appalachian Transport, Inc., on or about October 16,1997, defendants and Parks’s accountant, Tom Aderholt (who also had done work for plaintiff), telephoned plaintiff, whom they knew from their prior representation of him to be a wealthy man, to solicit an extension of credit from him to Parks. Defendants proposed to secure plaintiffs loan with a second mortgage on real estate known as Pine Island Bluff, near Lake Guntersville. Plaintiff alleges that he was told the property was worth more than a million dollars and that the first mortgage was only a small mortgage owed to AmSouth Bank in the range of $50,000 to $60,000. Plaintiff agreed to make a $100,000 loan to Parks.

On October 17,1997, defendants forwarded a “conflict waiver” letter to both Parks and plaintiff, explaining that defendants could not represent both parties in the loan transaction and proposing to represent only plaintiff. Both Parks and plaintiff agreed and consented. That same day, defendants prepared and the parties executed a promissory note from Parks to plaintiff in the amount of $100,000, a mortgage and security agreement on the Pine Island Bluff real property in favor of plaintiff, and various corporate resolutions evidencing Parks’s intent to execute the loan documents. Plaintiff wired $100,000 from his home in South Carolina to Parks’s account. Over the next several weeks and months, plaintiff extended additional credit to Parks in three increments of $25,000 each.

Plaintiff also alleges that he, while represented by defendants, reached an agreement to “factor” Parks’s accounts receivable. Under this arrangement, as Parks performed trucking work, the invoice for the work [289]*289would be “sold” to plaintiff at a discount and plaintiff would then collect the invoice from the customer for whom the work was performed. This enabled Parks to be paid almost immediately for work performed, resulting in improved cash flow. The arrangement called for a higher than normal discount rate to enable plaintiff to recoup his loan to Parks sooner. Plaintiff alleges that he understood that defendants were to prepare the appropriate documents for him to carry the factoring arrangement into effect and, in fact, defendant Leara did prepare and file a UCC-1 financing statement on Parks’s accounts receivable to secure the factoring arrangement in February 1998. As early as August 1998, however, plaintiff began to suspect that a number of invoices factored to him were fraudulent.

Plaintiff alleges that during the time the loans were extended to Parks and the factoring arrangement was in place, Parks was actually being operated by defendants. Plaintiff alleges that defendants were no longer just Parks’s attorneys and legal advisers, but, in fact, had physically taken over the daily operation of the business on October 15, 1997, directing the payment of creditors and making other daily business decisions. The sworn testimony of Jimmy Parks and DeWayne Parks, during the § 341 hearing in Parks’s bankruptcy, confirms that large sums of money raised and borrowed by Parks were delivered to defendants to be paid to Parks’s creditors as defendants directed. Plaintiff contends that defendants did so in a desperate attempt to save Parks from bankruptcy in order to preserve their investment in the on-going Ford litigation. Plaintiff asserts that defendants feared that if Parks went bankrupt they would lose control of the Ford litigation to the trustee in bankruptcy.

Ultimately, Parks did go bankrupt in November 1998, and defendants did lose control of the Ford litigation but not before seeking unsuccessfully to have the bankruptcy court appoint them as counsel for the trustee to handle the litigation. Plaintiff then began to discover a number of things disturbing about the transactions. First, plaintiff discovered that the mortgage he received on the Pine Island Bluff property, in fact, was on only part of the property and that his was only the fifth mortgage in line, not the second. In addition to the AmSouth mortgage he was advised of, Commerce Bank also held a $100,000 mortgage on the property. Additionally, Parks’s accountant, Tom Aderholt, and defendants themselves held mortgages totaling $150,000 superior to plaintiffs. Although defendants subsequently released their mortgage, they did so only after securing another mortgage in their favor on the part of the Pine Island Bluff property not covered by plaintiffs mortgage. Further, he discovered that neighbors near the Pine Island Bluff property had sued to stop development of the property, a fact he was not told when the property was offered as security for the loan he extended, and that he had been joined as a defendant in the litigation because of his mortgage position. It also came to light that as much as $160,000 worth of invoices sold to plaintiff under the factoring arrangement were fraudulent, having been presented to him for payment although no actual work had been performed for any customer. A former secretary at Parks has testified by affidavit that Parks sent fraudulent invoices to plaintiff for factoring for several months and, additionally, that Parks was collecting directly from customers on accounts already factored to plaintiff. She testified that in May or June 1998, prior to Park’s bankruptcy, she telephoned defendant Walsh and told him about the fraudulent invoices being sent to plaintiff, but Walsh only replied that he did not want to know anything about it.

The court stresses that these are the allegations of the plaintiff and not a finding of fact made by the court. Whether these allegations ultimately will prove out to be the facts remains to be seen. They are recited here, however, to set the context in which the attorney-client privilege issue is to be addressed.

Discovery Requests

Plaintiffs discovery request to defendants seeks production of documents in five distinct categories: (1) all documents relating to the October 1997 loan transaction by which plain[290]

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Bluebook (online)
202 F.R.D. 286, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21444, 2000 WL 33407329, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/mcclary-v-walsh-alnd-2000.