The Seventh Circuit had some rhetorical fun shutting down the plaintiff in a legal malpractice action and declaring that in real life, unlike in the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, one cannot turn straw to gold.
In the underlying case, a business won a $17 million default judgment against a defendant that lacked assets. So the judgment creditor forced the judgment debtor into bankruptcy and convinced the trustee to sue the debtor's law firm for malpractice on the theory that the default judgment never should have been entered in the first place. The judgment creditor assumed that it would then garner the lion's share of the malpractice damages. Given that the credtitor would be simultaneously asserting and assaulting the default judgment it obtained, the trial court and the appellate court invoked judicial estoppel to prevent the judgment creditor from "turning straw to gold."
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