Of all the lawsuits Wang’s lawyers filed against us, this one was the longest, most expensive and most dishonest. Wang’s lawyers turned a 2-3 day arbitration into a 4-year show trial that forced our tiny, 8-person charity into bankruptcy and out of business. Never before has so much money been spent to destroy so little an organization.
It began as a simple contract dispute. HelpMeSee was a start-up charity with two employees. They hired my start-up charity WonderWork to help them raise money. I signed a 5-year office lease and hired an entire team to provide all the services HelpMeSee needed. In just 9 months, we helped them raise almost $5 million dollars and acquire 70,000 new donors. But they quit 9 months into our 5-year agreement. According to our agreement, HelpMeSee owed us $1.1 million in severance. We offered to settle for around HALF of that: $600,000.
They refused. Instead of spending $600,000 to settle the dispute immediately, HelpMeSee spent $15+ million of its donations on legal fees over the next six years.
What rational person would ever spend $15 million instead of $600,000?
Obviously, the money didn’t matter. HelpMeSee’s real goal was to force us out of business because HelpMeSee considered us “competition.” (WonderWork and HelpMeSee were both blindness charities.) Charities aren’t supposed to “compete.” And they shouldn’t be forcing other charities out of business. But HelpMeSee is not your typical charity. The family that controls HelpMeSee is the 86th richest family in the world. And we weren’t the first charity this family had problems with.
The billionaire who started HelpMeSee signed Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffett’s “Giving Pledge” and promised to give 50% of his $2.5 billion estate to charity when he died. But when he died, his Will said if there was no estate tax, he wanted nothing to go to charity. The estate tax did exist when he died. But he already had given away almost all of his money to “various beneficiaries.” His son was thrown out of a major blindness charity who had to place a $4 million lien on his house to get a grant paid. We had no knowledge of any of this when HelpMeSee asked us for help.
After HelpMeSee refused our $600,000 settlement offer, our agreement called for arbitration. Our arbitration was scheduled for 2-3 days of hearings. The entire process would take a couple months and cost $25k. But then Charles Wang inserted himself into our dispute. When he heard about our dispute, Wang met with HelpMeSee and persuaded them to fire their lawyers – and hire his. Wang also offered HelpMeSee hundreds of pages of internal ST documents and several witnesses, including himself.
HelpMeSee immediately fired their lawyers, hired Wang’s lawyers. After being given a blank check by a billionaire family, Wang’s lawyers assigned 4 lawyers to the case including one that charges $1,400 an hour. The team’s “rate” was about $4,000 an hour. Or, $28,000 a day. HelpMeSee spent more money on legal fees than it did on surgeries.
We could only afford one lawyer, who was paid $400 an hour. That’s one tenth of what HelpMeSee was paying. We were a tiny, 8-person charity whose mission was to provide surgeries for the poor. We thought spending millions on legal fees was unethical and obscene.
The first thing Wang’s $4,000-an-hour legal team did was file an $8 million countersuit based on a long list of fabricated allegations. (HelpMeSee’s previous lawyers never alleged any counter-claims. ) Then they started requesting millions of pages of documents, emails, phone calls, etc. and filing all kinds of objections, requests for more information, allegations, complaints and threats. They submitted endless motions that were hundreds of pages long. Their antics prolonged everything and increased our legal fees exponentially – they were trying to bankrupt us.
With their unlimited budget, Wang’s lawyers flew in witnesses from all across the U.S. They spared no expense rehearsing, prepping and coaching each witness to say exactly what they wanted them to. It’s called “testi-lying.” No arbitration witness has ever been charged with perjury. Not only did all of their witnesses lie extensively, Wang’s lawyers lied too. I was shocked to see this. I come from a family of lawyers. My grandmother graduated from B.U. Law School in 1926 and was the first woman Probate Judge in Massachusetts. My dad graduated from Harvard Law Magna Cum Laude. I’ve met Justice Scalia and watched The Supreme Court in action. I have tremendous respect for the legal profession.
But the conduct of Wang’s lawyers, during this arbitration and all their other lawsuits over 10+ years, was in my opinion, unethical, dishonest and unprofessional. The fact that their $25+ million dollars in fees were paid for by charities speaks volumes. The majority of HelpMeSee witnesses knew nothing about the WonderWork – HelpMeSee contract dispute. Their only qualification was a willingness to disparage me. And virtually every witness was on Wang’s payroll directly or in-directly.
Wang’s lawyers tactics grew our 2-3-day arbitration into an almost 4-year “show trial” with millions of pages of documents. Years would pass between witnesses. Some of us worried the 80-year old arbitrator might die and we’d have to start all over again. It was easy for Wang’s lawyers to turn this into one of the longest arbitrations in history because the arbitrator was paid $400-an-hour. He accommodated virtually anything and everything Wang’s lawyers asked for. When our lawyer objected, thousands of times, the arbitrator always said, “I’ll allow it.” That’s how his compensation soared from $10,000 to $300,000.
While this legal nightmare slogged on in New York City, another was happening half way around the world. HelpMeSee invited all the major Indian blindness hospitals and charities to a special meeting and told them they had millions available for grants. But any hospitals or charities that worked with WonderWork would receive no grants from HelpMeSee. They told them WonderWork was going bankrupt and all WonderWork grants our partners received would be clawed back. When none of our partner hospitals responded, HelpMeSee tried to bribe them to stop working with us. These offers were also rejected. We told the arbitrator about this but he ignored it. And the next day, HelpMeSee’s lawyers in India threatened to sue the hospital that told us about this.
In 2017, Almost more than 5 years after our 2-3 day arbitration began, the arbitrator submitted his final report. It reads like it was written by Wang’s lawyers – because it was. Huge sections of the report were cut and pasted from submissions by Wang’s lawyers. The report repeats hundreds of lies and false allegations made by Wang’s lawyers and their paid witnesses. The arbitrator’s report is unprofessional and unsubstantiated. It makes generalized statements of so-called facts without any citations to the record which included more than 1,000 exhibits and 11,000 pages of testimony. Specific record citations should have been added to the award to support the findings — they were not. The failure to support the findings with record citations makes it impossible to verify the correctness of the findings.
The report reflects extreme bias, as it ignored all of the rebuttal proof WonderWork submitted that contradicted the so-called findings made in this report. The report contains 249 so-called facts which are false. A “fact-checked” version of this report which highlights every false fact and provides a detailed correction is available below.