Lawyer vs Lawyer: Bears Tickets Mine
Four years ago, Douglas Warlick and Donald Ramsell decided to share the cost of season tickets for the Chicago Bears, splitting the $10,000 application fee for four seat licenses. But as the team prospered, the two lawyers’ friendship faltered. Warlick liked to tailgate in the parking lot. Ramsell wanted to enjoy their luxury of being served in their club seats. Ramsell got tired, he says, of being treated like a limo service.
Fearful, that their waning friendship might mean the loss of his two season tickets, which are in Warlick’s name, Ramsell took a litigious approach to the situation. Instead of trying to talk it out with Warlick, he sued. His DuPage County Court filing alleges an oral contract and seeks a temporary restraining order preventing Warlick from selling the two season tickets he regards as his to anyone else, reports the Chicago Tribune.
“He’s a lawyer. I’m a lawyer,” says Ramsell, a Wheaton trial attorney who is representing himself in the case. “The courthouse is where you go when you have a dispute. I’m not going to let somebody muscle me out of my tickets.”
Warlick says he never intended to give up ownership of the season tickets he has held since 1985, and complains that he found out about the lawsuit from a Tribune reporter. “I’m still in shock – that’s so obnoxious, so immature,” the Geneva family law practitioner says of Ramsell’s court filing. “He could’ve just picked up the phone. I think ‘sad’ is an appropriate word for somebody who does something like that.”
