Summary: The law firm of Tycko & Zavareei has been award close to $1 million in legal fees and expenses for representing plaintiffs in an LSAT case.
Judge Royce Lamberth awarded close to $1 million in attorneys’ fees and expenses to the firm of Tycko & Zavareei LLP for representing three LSAT prep consumers, according to a release from PR Newswire.
Judge Lamberth sits on the bench of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The award of $927,707.89 was granted based on the consumer protection law of the District of Columbia. The award represents 96 percent of the amount requested by the clients of the law firm.
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The dispute came about after the plaintiffs tried to enroll in an LSAT course from TeamMasters, which is owned by Robin Singh. The plaintiffs paid between $1,000 and $3,000 for a course taught by an imposter company using the exact same name.
The defendant named in the case, Test Masters Educational Services, Inc. (TES), “actually misled them into signing up for the TES course instead of Singh’s course,” according to the court.
The plaintiffs were awarded $1,500 each in statutory damages.
TES received sanctions from the court for discovery abuse and was ordered to pay $59,909.19 in attorneys’ fees and expenses earlier in the litigation. The sanctions came from the company’s failure to preserve emails from consumers.
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Roger Israni, the president of TES, claimed the failure to hold onto the emails came from hard drives crashing and then the failure of the company’s backups.
The court found that Israni “has not provided a satisfactory explanation for the crash” and his “story heaps one implausible circumstance on top of another, and may suggest that TES intentionally destroyed the data and has encountered problems in trying to cover up that destruction.”
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