Sacramento Law firm utilizes LTC in $165 Million settlement

April 2008

A settlement involving the South Lake Tahoe hotel-casino, The Horizon, requires affiliates of William Yung's Columbia Sussex Corp. to pay at least $165 million over three years to resolve a lease dispute with Park Cattle Co., the owners of the land on which The Horizon stands.

LTC consultants supported the Sacramento-based lawyers for Park Cattle Co. by creating various 3-D animated models of the hotel-casino property, and provided strategy advice on-site with witness prep and in the courtroom throughout the duration of the trial.

The settlement was reached two days before closing arguments, ending a civil trial in Minden, NV, that began in February. Douglas County District Judge David Gamble sealed the case involving the Horizon hotel-casino, but the terms were disclosed in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing by Columbia Sussex.

According to the SEC filing, a $40 million payment was made April 2 to Park Cattle Co. by Kentucky-based Columbia Sussex affiliates.

Lawyers for the hotel-casino operators contended that Park Cattle, a Nevada real estate company with extensive land holdings at Tahoe and in the nearby Carson Valley, wanted to take over the casino and that there were no safety issues amounting to a breach of the lease.

Park Cattle Co. officials claimed that the operators were advised of various problems but only agreed to make repairs so that legal troubles wouldn't hold up their purchase that year of Caesars Tahoe, now the MontBleu, across the street. Park Cattle Co. also owns the building and the land under the building.

Judge Gamble, after notifying the jury of the settlement, told attorneys the nine-week case was the longest he’d had in his 21 years on the bench and 31 years of legal practice. “This has been a long trial, but good one,” Gamble said.

Gamble told the nine jurors that both parties in the lawsuit over upkeep of the Horizon and the lease agreement between the casino and Park Cattle Co. had tried to reach a conclusion before the trial. “If you had not been the way you are, if you had not been paying attention the way you did, this case would not be settled,” Gamble said. “I want to say how much I appreciate your service.”

In addition to the cash, Park Cattle receives certain protections in any future bankruptcy cases including any of the Horizon’s owners, quarterly and annual financial statements, and the maintenance of permits and licenses held by the Horizon and MontBleu.
Should Tropicana fail to comply, Park Cattle has the right to seek a judgment of $290 million, which would be reduced by any payments already made.

Under the settlement, the Horizon’s lease will end on March 31, 2011. If Tropicana can’t renew the lease by April 2, 2011, Park could terminate the lease and take over the Horizon and operate it using its equipment for two years.

Downey Brand attorney Bill Warne along with the firms Litigation Support Manger, Betty Barth, contacted Legal Technology Consulting in January to inquire about providing assistance with the visuals, the strategy of the presentations and to model the casino-resort of the Horizon. “The original plan was to model the resort in 3-D and to show the areas where Park Cattle experts found evidence of hazardous materials such as friable asbestos and mold” said LTC founder and co-owner Tim Piganelli. Attorney Warne then asked the LTC staff to travel to South Lake Tahoe to participate in an inspection of the property, together with other experts in the case, so that LTC consultants could get a visual view of the property and to document key areas for the animation work expected. From that point, LTC gathered three of its consulting experts, Chris Lakso, the companies Animation expert and trial consultant, Diane Piganelli, a veteran trial consultant and strategist and Tim Piganelli, the company’s founder and CEO.

The three consultants traveled to South Lake Tahoe and inspected, photographed and videotaped nearly every part of the property. “It was an exhausting two days”, said trial consultant Diane Piganelli. “We must have taken a thousand photographs along with hours of video”.

Once the team finished their 2-day inspection it was time to get to work. Animation expert Chris Lakso and his team began modeling the entire facility with the aid of photos and video taken, plus various blue prints provided by some of the experts. “Since there were no detailed “as-built” plans from which to work from, it was difficult to model the facility,” said Lakso. “We had to rely on old blue prints, some of which date as far back as the 1960’s when the original building was designed and built.” Lakso had to match blueprint with photos and video to see if the supplied drawings were accurate. From there he and his team modeled the facility and created an animation that flew around the facility providing the judge and the jury a bird’s eye view of the entire property.

While the animation progressed, Diane Piganelli worked with the Downey Brand law firm staff, to begin developing the strategies for the opening statement presentation, the management of the 10,000+ trial exhibits and the technology plan that would ultimately be used for case evidence presentations. Once the work was done in Sacramento, the trial team moved to Minden and began the trial. Diane’s job was to assist with the presentations, develop strategies for presenting evidence in a clear and concise manner and ensure the technology in both the courtroom and war rooms were intact to avoid any flaws. In addition Diane operated the laptop computer that presented evidence in court each trial day.

“Diane did a superb job. I’ll never want to go to trial without her”, said lead trial attorney, Bill Warne. “She is second to none. She has the most diligent work ethic and energy level. We could not have done it with her,” said Andrew Collier one of the lead trial attorneys from the Downey Brand firm.

While Diane was in Minden, the LTC home team continued to create and refine animations to assist experts in their testimony. “Our job was to assist the jury with 3-D visuals that would show specific areas of the resort, certain rooms or mechanical catwalk areas where experts found evidence of asbestos and mold. We then related the proximity of those contaminated areas to occupied areas of the hotel-casino”, said LTC founder Tim Piganelli. Tim, along with Lakso began working with testifying experts to customize each of their supporting animations. For example, LTC modeled the garage so that the concrete and structural expert could show the defects in the garage.

LTC used a technique that combines 3-D animations and the actual evidentiary photographs into one demonstrative. The animation would “fly” the viewer into a specific area of the resort and then, using the photograph, the actual photo would “morph” into view showing the actual evidence that was found by experts.

“Morphing in the photo is one of the best methods for validating the expert’s testimony together with the animation designed to support that testimony. While we could have created an animation to demonstrate how the mold grew or how the friable asbestos flowed through the air plenum space, we decided to use the actual photo exhibit embedded in animation giving the animation better foundation,” explained Tim Piganelli.

“The animations were extremely helpful, we loved them” said Juror Number 6. “They really helped us understand where exactly the issues were in the property.”

“There is no question that LTC is very proud of the expert work that Diane performed and what she did for this trial team” (Tim) Piganelli said. “Her experience and expertise were found to be invaluable. Our clients could not complement Diane enough.”

“We are very pleased with the outcome of this project. Although the case settled, rather than obtaining a significant jury verdict in favor of our client, there is no doubt that Park Cattle Co. considered the outcome a huge victory,” Diane Piganelli concluded.