The following summaries are of recent published decisions of the California appellate courts, the Ninth Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court. The summaries are presented without regard to whether Severson & Werson represented a party in the case.
Plaintiff tried to refinance her Wells Fargo home loan with another lender but that effort was thwarted by a fraudulent third party's lien on the property. Plaintiff contends that Wells Fargo should have helped her remove the fraudulent lien, but instead it started foreclosure proceedings on her loan. She filed a Chapter 13 bankruptcy to avoid the foreclosure and listed… Read More
Defendant was not judicially estopped from contending that a later "forbearance agreement" fully released him from obligations under an earlier "settlement agreement." In other litigation, defendant had referred to the the "forbearance agreement" as being "brief"--which could have meant short in words, not time, but in any event there was no evidence that the court in the other case had… Read More
This decision affirms dismissal of plaintiff's complaint on judicial estoppel grounds. In prior litigation over the same award of rights to assign .africa URLs, plaintiff took the position before an international arbitration panel that plaintiff could not sue in court over the award. That position was completely inconsistent with its current assertion of the right to sue in court over… Read More
Judicial estoppel forbids a defendant from asserting that a court lacked authority to impose monetary sanctions when, in an earlier suit, the defendant successfully argued that the court should have entered monetary sanctions rather than terminating sanctions. Read More
