Many people have asked me for information on the lawsuit I filed against Millennium Marketing Group. Since Scott Norman has been spreading disinformation about the nature and outcome of that action I will post as much as I can here.
After my contract with MMG expired and after my last personal contacts with Scott Norman in 2003 I felt that I had very good cause to initiate legal action against MMG. My first act was to contact the Kansas Attorney General. Despite having a large dossier on MMG and Norman the AG insisted that the only course of action was through the civil court system and they referred me on to an attorney.
In April of 2004 I filed suit in Johnson County, Kansas, against Scott Norman and Millennium Marketing Group charging 42 violations of the Kansas Consumer Protection Act (KCPA) and violations of the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA).
Unfortunately I had not chosen the right attorney in Kansas and I received bad advice from the outset.
Our legal strategy positioned the strength of the case in the AIPA charges, which would land us in federal court and be relatively painless and straightforward to prove. Unfortunately we (my attorney) missed the giant loophole in the Act, which is thoroughly explained in my section on Scott Norman, MMG and the AIPA. The Act is directed against invention promoters and the loophole lies in the Act's definition of "invention promoter". Norman is a niche player in the world of invention promotion, one who trolls the USPTO database looking for patent owners he can target with marketing proposals. Because Norman deals only with patented inventions he can profess to not be an invention promoter and he can claim immunity from the Act. He does not have to disclose under the Act, you cannot file a complaint with the USPTO against Norman or MMG under the Act, and neither can be sued under the Act. So even though Norman and MMG are exactly the type of entities the Act was supposed to protect us from, that loophole is there and Scotty beamed himself right on through it at warp speed.
I didn't fully realize it at the time, but Norman had figured out a way to turn the AIPA upside down and use it to protect himself, the invention promoter, at the expense of inventors like myself whom the law was originally designed to protect.
We had to drop the AIPA charges. That left us with the KCPA charges in Kansas and that would be much more difficult. Here's why:
1. The nature of the law and the system. Whereas going after Norman under the AIPA would have been straightforward and focused, the KCPA offers a much broader playing field to the defense. A defense attorney can file endless motions and use the system to drag things out forever. The primary defense goal becomes to exhaust their opponent and drain them of resources, and the system accommodates this strategy very well. Two years into the legal action we were just starting to actually prepare to go to court when my attorney withdrew from the case.
2. The fraud factor. Even though the KCPA is supposedly written to protect the consumer against fraud in the marketplace, it doesn't seem to actually provide much protection. It was not a good legal vehicle to use against MMG and Norman. Proving fraud is extremely difficult unless the target is an ongoing, hardcore criminal enterprise. It takes a very good attorney to do so, and I didn't have one. All Norman had to do to cop a winning defense would be to plead incompetence and sloppy business practices, which aren't crimes. I believe this is the defense he was working towards.
That doesn't mean I couldn't have won the case. I had very strong evidence against Norman and would have liked nothing better than to put him and his employees on the witness stand. But it became impossible to go that far, and I no longer had an attorney.
3. The corporate veil. It was important to the case to sue both MMG the corporation and Scott Norman the individual. But in Kansas the corporate veil protects the individual, in this case Norman, to the extent that he is almost untouchable, no matter how outrageous his actions and behavior. That leaves you with the corporation as your only real target, and corporations are very easy to keep drained of money. I would have had to spend $100K to win the case against MMG, and I would have probably found some small change in the corporate petty cash drawer.
And further:
3. The hassle factor. Both my attorney and I failed to adequately consider the extreme difficulty of conducting a protracted and complex legal action in Kansas from my home base in Colorado. I fault my attorney specifically for not fully anticipating and advising me of this from the outset. The fact of the litigation alone, which was involving thousands of pages of legal documents, was causing significant and ongoing disruptions in my life.
4. The money factor. Not only was the cost of pursuing the case roaring completely out of control, the probability of monetary recovery in the event of a victory was remote to nonexistent. This was another serious downfall on the part of my attorney. People "win" huge judgments in civil suits all the time and never collect a dime. It is for these reasons that good attorneys, and I did receive good legal advice from other quarters, advise their clients to forego litigation entirely unless they have very deep pockets and lots of court time to burn. I had neither. It just isn't worth it. It matters not one bit how right you are or the strength of your case. If the other side can drain you financially they will, and that's how the bad guys win again and again.
That's the legal advice I SHOULD have gotten, and didn't. The best advice any inventor can get on these issues comes down to four words: STAY OUT OF COURT. You only go when you really, absolutely have no other choice, and hopefully have an attorney working on a contingency.
In June of 2006 my attorney announced that he was withdrawing from the case. I was now without legal representation and would be forced to travel to Kansas, find and hire an attorney who would have to be brought up to speed on the case at a crippling financial cost. A mediator had been appointed by the court and both parties were ordered to attempt to seek a negotiated solution.
In August of 2006 Norman and I mutually agreed to Dismissal with Prejudice, meaning that the case would be over forever. Contrary to what Norman has been saying in public and in private there was no summary judgment in this case. A summary judgment can only be issued by a judge, and our case was settled by mutual consent through a mediator. Nor was the case ever found to be "baseless", since there was no entity to find it "baseless" and the evidence piling up against Norman was pretty overwhelming. You have to consider what kind of a person would lie so blatantly about this type of thing, but then again, look at his track record...
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