Our Legal Complaint 

as of March 28

Today we got the legal answer from Daniel Butterfield and Tapco (Expert Realty Advisors). Of course it is SOP to deny all claims and seek dismissal of the complaint.  I guess that is like a "how do you plead" deal.  OK, so they say not guilty, only then the judge gets to ask why? and decide if he likes your answer enough to say case dismissed.

 

It is interesting that we are working with two different law firms:  one for DB and Tapco, and a different one for IPX and EFP.  And the two responses are so very, very different.  Does that help them or us?  Who knows?

 

This is the real problem we face:  He has deep pockets and can out spend and outlast us in court.   We knew this going in and will just stick with it as long as we can.

 

Of course, this lawyer is "advising" us that we face big bills on any individual items in our claim upon which we don't prevail.  Plus we will be subject to a percentage of the liability the jury decides is due to our negligence.   And they could decide it is 50-50 or even decide we are responsible for 99% of the damages ( $$ lost).  Got it... so how committed are we?  This is what he's hoping for: scare us off?  How long til our money is gone and we have nothing left to continue the fight?  I'll keep you posted.

as of March 20 

So by now you all know my identity and the fact that we have filed a complaint against Daniel Butterfield et al with the civil division of the superior court.  And we have our first answer to the court from IPX and EFP and we need some luck… that is more often than not what you need when going to court… hence the mercy of the court saying.  Lord, Judge, have mercy on us, please.

 

IPX’s lawyer is petitioning for dismissal of 4 of our 6 counts in our complaint (legal term for what we laymen call a law suit).  He is asking the court to dismiss our consumer fraud counts based on the statute of limitations.  The AZ Consumer Fraud Act states “The plaintiff must bring a consumer fraud claim within one year after the cause of action accrues. Accrual occurs when the plaintiff discovered, or in the exercise of reasonable care and diligence could have discovered, the fraud.”

 

We will have to argue that we did not discover the fraud until we went to sell our first property in June of 2017, and then the others, and thus accrual should begin then.  However, the judge can say that we didn’t exercise reasonable care and diligence when we bought the property.  Yep, here’s my sign!  As you all know, that is the focus of this blog…. Our failure to exercise care and diligence because we trusted IPX!

 

The 2 remaining counts are Intentional Misrepresentation and Breach of Contract.  

 

All this back and forth takes time, but as developments occur I will update.