More on the Anaheim lawsuit

You have to scroll way down to read it here, but that losing battle the City of Anaheim fought against the Angels wasn’t cheap:

After spending roughly $4 million in legal fees, the City of Anaheim agreed to drop its civil suit against its baseball team–the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim–seeking to have the “L.A.” dropped from its name.

I wish I had a time machine, because I would go back to 2004 and volunteer to lose the case for the City for half of that. As for the Angels:

An Angels spokesperson told reporters that the team had spent nearly $7.5 million on its lawyers from Buchalter Nemer, Powell Goldstein (now part of Bryan Cave), and Southern California’s Theodora Oringher Miller & Richman during the four-year legal battle.

Yes, I know trials are expensive things, but I am struggling to see how on Earth a case that involves the interpretation of a single clause in a contract can cost you $7.5 million. Heck, I can’t even begin to think of how I could pad a phony bill to run it up that high, let alone a legitimate one. As the AmLaw blogger writes, they might want to have saved some of that money for Teixiera, no?


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themarksmith
15 years ago

Doing anything with that money would have been better.

Tony
15 years ago

$7.5MM!!!  At $450/hour, that works out to roughly two people working on this case for 8 hours per day, every work day, for four years.

APBA Guy
15 years ago

And yet, Arte probably says to himself “I’ll just pass that $ 7.5M along to the customer (ie, fans)” like every other owner does.

Chris
15 years ago

Actually, it’s not that hard to see from the team’s perspective: if you think that being the Los Angeles Angels instead of the Anaheim Angels is worth, say, $100M, it’s easy to “overpay” to make sure that you’re absolutely minimizing your chances of losing the suit.

From the city’s perspective, it’s a lot harder to justify the expense – does the city of Anaheim really gain so much from a name change that it was worth pursuing the suit this far?

That said, it’s really too bad Moreno will be long gone by the time the stadium lease is up, because I would love to see the Angels fail to find a site within the LA city limits so that he’s forced to try to negotiate a lease extension with Anaheim…

Craig Calcaterra
15 years ago

I’m not doubting that such a calculation may make sense, Chris. I’m just doubting that the case required anything approaching the expenditure of $7M+.

Chris
15 years ago

Sorry, that came out wrong. I think it’s overkill; it’s just “justifiable” overkill from the team’s perspective, in that reducing the chance of losing the lawsuit by an extra 5% might well be worth an extra $5M in fees.

As to why it would actually cost anywhere near $5M to get that reduction in a case like this, I’m as baffled as you…