“What goes around, comes around” is a popular expression where I come from. It is a celebration of comeuppance, the schadenfreude one feels when, every so often, some bad deeds do not go unpunished.
About fifteen months ago, one of my ClaimIntercept™ subscribers had gotten a demand letter from someone for whom he had performed a home inspection. The claim was prototypical of a home inspection claim in that it had no merit as to the home inspector and very likely none to either of the other targets, the seller of the home and the listing agent.
I wrote a letter that really knocked the claimant, who was an attorney with a very large firm, off of his pins. He forwarded the letter to counsel for the other two presumptive culprits and I subsequently received a call from the attorney for the seller who told me that, while he thought the letter was a work of art, it had “really set [the claimant] off.”
“Good”, I replied, “my fastball must not have lost any of its velocity.”
The purpose of the phone call was to ascertain my client’s interest in contributing to a settlement and I advised the attorney that I would pass the request along to my client but that I could not recommend any participation on my client’s part beyond nuisance value.
There ensued a few more conference calls with the claimant and his wife and attorneys for the other two parties, during which I stuck to my guns and the other participants, to my considerable delight, put up a yeoman-like effort of not caving. Eventually, the attorney-claimant saw the futility of having me pouring ice water all over his bogus claims at any future trial of the matter and the parties eventually managed to fashion a settlement to which my client made a relatively modest contribution.
That was then.
The other day my client called me and said “Do you remember [the above described case]?”
I sure did.
“Well, guess what? The house is back on the market. And … the buyer’s agent then is now the listing agent and the listing agent is now the buyer’s agent. And I was asked to inspect it.”
“And”, he continued, “he didn’t fix any of the things that he was complaining about!”
How … sweet it [sometimes] is!
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