I called him a THUG in open court – and the moment the judge asked him to state his occupation, my stomach dropped.
My attorney had told me this was a simple property dispute. Twelve years of building my landscaping business, and some leather-jacket biker with a face full of tattoos was claiming I’d stolen his client list. I wasn’t scared. I was insulted.
I’d said it loud enough for the whole room to hear. Thug. My wife, Deanna, had grabbed my arm. Even my lawyer, Pat Hennessey, had gone pale.
The biker’s name was apparently Derek Foss. He’d walked in alone – no attorney, no briefcase, just worn boots and a calm that made me more irritated than nervous.
He sat down across the aisle and didn’t look at me once.
When the judge asked for opening statements, Derek stood up and set a single folder on the table.
“Your Honor,” he said, “I’ll keep this brief.”
He spoke for four minutes without notes. Clean sentences. No filler. He cited two federal statutes by number.
Something shifted in the room.
Pat leaned over and said, “Where did this guy go to school?”
I didn’t answer because I was watching the judge – and the judge was NODDING.
Derek reached into the folder and pulled out a stack of documents. Contracts. Dated. Signed. A client list with my company’s letterhead on it, timestamped three weeks before I’d supposedly created it.
My hands were shaking.
“Mr. Foss,” the judge said, “are you representing yourself?”
“I am,” Derek said. “I passed the bar in 2004. I practiced corporate litigation for eleven years before I retired.”
THE ENTIRE ROOM WENT QUIET.
I looked at Deanna. She was staring at her lap.
Pat gathered his papers very slowly, like he was buying time to think.
Derek never raised his voice. He never looked at me with satisfaction or anger. He just kept presenting, document by document, while my case came apart at the seams.
During the recess, I stepped into the hallway.
Derek was already there, pouring coffee from a thermos.
He looked up, held out a cup, and said, “Your bookkeeper has been talking to my former partner for about six months. You might want to ask her why.”
The Part I Haven’t Said Out Loud Yet
I didn’t take the coffee.
I don’t know why I’m telling that detail, except that it keeps coming back to me. He held it out. I stood there. I walked away.
That’s the version of me I have to live with now.
Her name was Gail Morrow. Twenty-two years old, hired eighteen months ago on a referral from my brother-in-law, Steve. Good with numbers. Quiet. Always stayed late. I’d given her a raise in March because she never complained and she never made mistakes, or so I thought.
Derek’s former partner was a man named Ray Kundert. I didn’t know that name at all, not even a little, which told me everything. Whatever was happening between Gail and Ray had been happening entirely outside anything I could see.
I found this out standing in a courthouse hallway, holding nothing, while Derek capped his thermos and walked back toward the courtroom like he’d just mentioned the weather.
I stood there for probably two full minutes before Pat found me.
“We need to talk about a settlement,” he said.
I asked him how bad it was.
He looked at the floor. “The letterhead thing is bad. The timestamps are worse.”
What Twelve Years Actually Looks Like
I started the business in 2011 with a used truck, a push mower, and seventeen residential clients I’d poached from the lawn crew I’d been working for since I was nineteen. I know that sounds ironic now. I’ve thought about it.
By year four I had six employees and a commercial account with a property management company called Halloran Group that paid more per month than I used to make in a year. By year eight I had twenty-three employees, a second truck, and a reputation in three counties.
The client list Derek was suing over had roughly 340 names on it. Commercial and residential. Some of those clients I’d had for a decade. Some of them I’d driven to the hospital when they had emergencies because that’s the kind of relationships you build when you show up every week for ten years.
Derek’s claim was that the list, the specific formatting, the contact notes, the service histories, had been copied from a database he’d built during a separate landscaping operation he ran before I’d ever heard his name. That the whole architecture of it had been taken wholesale and dropped into my system.
Pat had told me the claim was thin. That client lists weren’t automatically protectable. That we’d win on the merits.
Pat had not seen the timestamps.
Gail
I called her that evening. After court. After Deanna had gone upstairs without saying much and I was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of water I hadn’t touched.
Gail picked up on the second ring.
I told her I’d had an interesting day in court. I told her a man named Ray Kundert had come up. I kept my voice flat because I didn’t trust what would happen if I didn’t.
She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, “I didn’t think it would go this far.”
I asked her what that meant.
She said Ray had told her it was just a civil matter. That Derek only wanted acknowledgment, maybe a licensing arrangement. That it wouldn’t end up in front of a judge.
I asked her when she’d first talked to Ray.
She said October. Last year.
I’d given her the raise in March.
I put the phone down on the table without hanging up and sat there for a while. I could hear her voice, small and tinny, saying my name a few times. Then it stopped.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Deanna came down at some point and looked at the phone and looked at me and didn’t ask.
What I Got Wrong
Here’s the thing I keep circling back to, the part that’s hard to say straight.
I wasn’t wrong that someone had betrayed me. I wasn’t wrong that the situation was more complicated than Pat had prepared me for. I wasn’t wrong that there were real damages to sort out.
But I’d walked into that courtroom and looked at Derek Foss, at the jacket, the boots, the ink on his neck, and I’d made a decision about who he was before he opened his mouth. I’d said it out loud. Loud enough that the court reporter’s fingers had paused for just a second before continuing.
Derek had graduated from Case Western in 1999. I looked it up later that night. Corporate litigation at a firm in Cleveland for eleven years. He’d left practice in 2015, bought twelve acres outside of town, and spent the last several years doing, among other things, landscaping consulting. He’d built the client database as part of a side operation he ran with Ray Kundert before Ray had apparently decided to use it as leverage in ways Derek hadn’t sanctioned.
Derek hadn’t wanted to sue me. That came out later too. Ray had pushed for it. Derek had eventually agreed because the alternative was letting someone use his work without any acknowledgment at all.
He’d shown up alone because he didn’t need anyone.
The Settlement
We reached it three weeks later. I won’t get into every number, but it was real money. A licensing fee structured over four years. An acknowledgment in writing that the database architecture had originated with Derek’s operation. A clause that gave him audit rights for two years to confirm I wasn’t using the contact notes in ways that weren’t covered.
Pat tried to negotiate the audit clause out. Derek’s position was that without it, there was no deal.
We kept the audit clause.
Gail had already resigned by then, two days after my phone call. She left a handwritten note on my desk that I read once and threw away. I don’t remember exactly what it said. Something about being sorry. Something about not understanding how it would unfold.
Steve, my brother-in-law, called to apologize for the referral. I told him it wasn’t his fault. I mostly meant it.
Ray Kundert, as far as I know, faced no legal consequences. Derek apparently considered it and decided it wasn’t worth his time. That’s the part that still bothers me a little, if I’m being honest. But it’s not my call.
The Hallway
I went back to the courthouse once more, about six weeks after the settlement, to file some paperwork related to the licensing structure. Bureaucratic stuff. An hour, maybe less.
Derek was there. Different matter, different courtroom. I saw him in the parking lot, same jacket, loading a box into the back of a truck that had more miles on it than mine.
I walked over.
I told him I owed him an apology for what I’d said in court. I said it straight, no qualifiers, because I’d practiced it enough times in the car that I knew if I started hedging I’d never get through it.
He closed the tailgate.
He said, “I’ve been called worse.”
Then he said, “For what it’s worth, your operation is solid. The client relationships are real. That’s harder to build than a database.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just nodded.
He got in his truck and pulled out of the lot.
I stood there for a second, then walked to my own truck, sat down, and looked at my hands on the steering wheel for a while.
I thought about the coffee he’d offered me in the hallway. How I’d walked away from it.
I thought about Gail staying late every night, and what she’d been doing on her computer, and how I’d never once wondered.
I thought about twelve years and what I’d built and how fast a room can go quiet.
Then I started the truck and went back to work.
—
If this one got under your skin, pass it along to someone who needs the reminder that you can’t always tell a book by its jacket.
For more unexpected turns and surprising heroes, check out what happened when the biker reached into his jacket or how a stranger stepped in to help my daughter. You might also be intrigued by the drawing on my daughter’s tablet that gave me pause.
