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The rich are different from you and me: Wellesley legal edition

When you're suing your architects because, you say, they forced your home-expansion project to go more than $15 million over budget, you do things like hiring 19 extra lawyers to supplement the 6 you've already retained to go through the more than 2 million pages of documentation the architects produced in response to your "discovery" demands.

It's the latest legal turn in the 2021 lawsuit filed by a local rich guy who owns an English soccer team, no, not that guy, the other one, John Berylson of Wellesley Hills, and his wife, against 1100 Architect of New York, whom they charge turned their Wellesley Hills home-expansion project into the mother of all money pits.

Today, both sides asked the federal judge in the case, Richard Stearns, for 25 more days to complete discovery - in this case the process of sifting through documents. In addition to the 2 million pages in 162,000 documents that 1100 Architect handed over, 1100's lawyer are having to go through large volumes of documents handed over by contractors the Berylsons hired to expand their manse from 12 to 37 rooms, including a dining pavilion, a project so large they could only accomplish it by first buying a neighboring home and tearing it down. It's the third time the two sides have told Stearns they need more time.

In their request, lawyers for the two sides wrote:

Since that time [of the last extension request, in July], the Parties have continued their accelerated efforts to produce documents, including Defendants’ retaining of an outside team of twenty (20) contract attorneys to assist in completing a review of the more than 160,000 documents responsive to the Plaintiffs’ search terms. At the same time, the Plaintiffs’ counsel’s team of six lawyers and one paralegal retained an outside team of up to nineteen (19) additional contract attorneys to assist in completing a review their own documents for production as well as the review of the same 160,000 documents produced by the Defendants. All parties have had to review the 76,000 documents produced by the third-parties to date.

Stearns took almost no time to to reply.

He granted the extension request, but told the two sides this was the last time he'd do so, setting an end to discovery on Nov. 10. Trial, if it gets that far, might start sometime next year, although Stearns set an April 12 deadline just for the two sides to get through everything else, including motions and replies to those motions by either side for summary judgment.

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Comments

I'd like to nominate these people to the "resource squandering" hall of fame; they deserve awards in all categories.

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Now there's a lawyer feeding frenzy. They're calling in all their friends. Money! Come and get some!

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I am just like these people. What makes me so different from John Berylson, besides that I would never deign to live in the slums of Wellesley Hills?

So what if I am temporarily inconvenienced and do not have

  1. A $15M overflow budget
  2. 19 lawyers to supplement the 6 I have already assigned
  3. 2 million pages of documentation
  4. an English soccer team
  5. a manse, and
  6. a neighbor amenable to me purchasing their manse and tearing it down in my manse expansion

Besides that, how different are we really?

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Question for Adam: "... documents handed over by contractors the Berylsons hired to expand their manse from 12 to 37, ...." Um, that's 12 to 37 whats? Hundreds of square feet? Rooms? Outbuildings? I'm guessing rooms but truly not sure, and I can't find reference to it in the attachment or via the linked post about the original suit. Thanks in advance!

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Yeah, they want to go from 12 to 37 rooms. Fixed.

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They are looking to expand from 12 to 37 lawsuits. /s

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is that really rich people like litigation of any type.

I guess if you can buy everything you need, it’s worth spending buckets of money to prove that the other person is wrong. :)

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In my experiences working for multiple architecture firms I've learned the rich prefer to sue architects when the opportunity arises instead of taking responsibility for what is typically poor or slow decision making by the owner. Often the owner tries to negotiate the architects fees down, if they are hiring teams of lawyers I'd speculate they will find something to make this all worth their while and the architect will end up going out of business and in dept to pay their legal fees unless they have great liability insurance....then maybe they will just lose a month's worth of billable hours going through the trial.

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How do you think they get rich?

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but obscene when you really think about it.

18 Then he said, "This is what I will do: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and store all my grain and my goods in them,

19 and I will say to my soul: My soul, you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come; take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time."

20 But God said to him, "Fool! This very night the demand will be made for your soul; and this hoard of yours, whose will it be then?"

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I've read articles about how dismal the landscape is for job opportunities for the majority of recent law school grads (e.g. those who aren't a T-14 top of class). A lot of them end up getting paid pretty poorly to do what is essentially white collar mill work where they pore through documents from discovery for the legal team that's actually working with the client(s).

My suspicion is that the nineteen lawyers cited are in that realm.

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Because let's be honest, if this guy had all this money to spend on things other than lawyers and dining pavilions right now, we would all have to suffer through more "No On 1" bullshit ads during the Pats games.

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Exactly why I preferred being a commercial architect over residential.

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