Green Jacobson P.C.

Martin Green and Brad Schneider won unanimous verdicts for our client today from a St. Louis County jury, recovering her entire investment and additional costs she had incurred as a result of the defendants’ fraud, and defeating the defendants’ counterclaim that she had stolen from their business.

Our client, a native of Perryville, thought she was fulfilling her life-long dream of owning her own small business when she invested in “Play,” an upscale clothing boutique in Clayton. She invested $154,000 in exhange for a 50% ownership interest and a job running the store.

Within days of our client’s investment, however, the two partners from whom she bought her interest had spent almost all of our client’s investment.

They used her money to pay off more than $100,000 of existing but undisclosed company debt, all of which they had personally guaranteed, and to pay themselves “reimbursements.”

The defendants’ actions left Play with almost no operating capital. To protect the business and her investment, our client was compelled to pay nearly $20,000 in inventory and business expenses using her personal credit cards. Unsurprisingly, relations with her partners grew steadily worse, until the partners stopped paying her salary and reimbursing her expenses for the company. Two days after a heated confrontation with her partners, our client came to Green Jacobson for help.

Martin and Brad showed the jury over the course of the four-day trial that our client had been defrauded, drawn into this investment by her future partners’ misrepresentations about Play’s financial condition, the value of the company’s assets, and how her investment money would be used.

A highlight of the trial was Martin’s old-fashioned, fire-and-brimstone closing argument, in which he told the jury that, as they had looked into the eyes of the one defendant who testified, they could see her soul and it was rotten.

Martin explained after the trial that, “for this case, for this jury, it was the argument they needed.”

The jury needed less than an hour and a half to unanimously decide that our client had been defrauded and to award her approximately $172,000 in actual damages. The jury also unanimously rejected the defendants’ counterclaim, alleging that our client had stolen more than $23,000 from the company.