Don’t Mess with CJ’s Online Sellers
This is news for Amazon sellers, and it’s great news. I can sum it up with one thing: Don’t mess with our sellers.
There’s a law firm in California called Thoits Law, T-H-O-I-T-S Law, and they’re in Los Altos, California, and they came to New York. They came to the Southern District of New York and filed a lawsuit against 67 or 68 different online sellers, and one of them was our client. They got a temporary restraining order against our client, freezing their assets, and they had no grounds for it. They had no grounds to sue in New York. New York did not have jurisdiction. They had no grounds for the claims, because our clients never sold the alleged infringing products.
So here’s what we did. I spoke with this lawyer, and said, “Hey, listen, you have no grounds to sue in New York. There were no products ever delivered in New York state. Number two, you have no grounds on the merits, because our client never sold a single unit, and you should cut them loose right now.”
What these lawyers did is they tried to get me to agree that they should be able to keep half of the money that was frozen in the accounts simply because they were able to get the temporary restraining order.
So I stopped the lawyer and said, “You know what? I don’t want to hear anymore about how you practice law, because if I hear more, I might be obligated to make a complaint against you. I don’t want to be in that position, so stop talking to me. I’ll see you in court.”
We immediately made an emergency motion to dissolve the restraining order. We made a motion to dismiss the entire case.
He dropped his demand to settle from like $32,000 to $5,000. Some of you might remember the scene in The Godfather where the senator was trying to extort money from Michael Corleone. His answer was, “Nothing. I will give you nothing, and you can pay the filing fees of the blah, blah, blah, license for his casinos”.
So that’s why I told this lawyer. I told him, “Absolutely nothing.” If he wants to resolve things with us, he should pay our legal fees, he should pay for our client’s damages, and he should also throw some money at our client for the pay-per-click advertising it’s going to take to rebuild his account.”
Then I went to the judge, and I wrote to the judge saying, “Your honor, please give me permission to jump in and help out all the other sellers as well, because I think this lawsuit is full of bunk.” (I used nicer language with the court).
What did this lawyer do? It turns out before I sent the letter to the court asking for permission to oppose the entire case, the lawyer discontinued the action against our client.
What this legal document shown here is, is a voluntary dismissal by Thoits Law dismissing the claims against our client.
But I’m going to let you know, that’s not the end of it. You don’t mess with our clients. Now, we’re going to go after the lawyer, his law firm, and their client to cover our client’s legal fees to pay for the damages they caused. I’ll keep you updated.
So the breaking news is one, you don’t mess with our clients. Two, online sellers have rights. Three, if you do mess with our clients, you can expect me and my team to come after you with nuclear weapons.
CALL 1-877-9-SELLER FOR A FREE CONSULTATION OR SUBMIT A CASE ONLINE