James T. Johnston, Jr. and G. Roger Land, attorneys, sued their former client, Gail M. Bradley, to collect attorney fees due under a written contract. Bradley appeals from the trial court’s order granting a portion of the relief sought by Johnston and Land on summary judgment, and denying relief she sought on summary judgment. For the following reasons, we reverse. The facts are undisputed. Bradley and her brother, Forrest, each owned a 50 percent undivided interest in a 123.1-acre tract of real property in Towns County. After Forrest died, Bradley, who was Forrest’s sole heir, hired Johnston and Land to contest Forrest’s will, which devised his interest in the real property to a third party. The written attorney fee contract dated June 2007 provided in the event of a settlement that payment for legal services would be “forty percent of any gross proceeds,” and that “attorneys agree to be paid by the conveyance of real property rather than cash at the election of Client.” Johnston and Land negotiated a settlement approved by the probate court in May 2008 under which the probate court entered a consent order finding that the will was invalid and that Bradley owned the entire 123.1-acre tract, and under which Bradley then deeded the third party an agreed upon 20-acre portion of the tract.
About two months before the May 2008 hearing to approve the settlement, a memorandum from Johnston and Land to Bradley proposed that the “gross proceeds” she would receive pursuant to the settlement could be calculated under the fee contract by multiplying the acreage she received by the dollar value per acre. The memo construed the settlement to mean that Bradley would receive her deceased brother’s half of the 123.1-acre tract 61.55 acres less the 20 acres deeded to the third party for a total amount of 41.55 acres. The memo informed Bradley that a local realtor thought the land was worth about $20,000 per acre, but that a November 2007 sale of nearby comparable land conveyed 5.3 acres for $32,075 per acre. The memo proposed to average these per acre figures at $26,037.50 per acre, then multiply by 41.55 acres to calculate that Bradley received gross proceeds in land worth $1,081,858, and concluded that attorney fees of 40 percent of this sum would amount to $432,743 in cash. About a month before the settlement hearing, Johnston wrote Bradley a letter about payment of attorney fees under the contract. Although he acknowledged that the fee contract provided for payment in real property rather than cash, he set forth various reasons why he and Land preferred not to be paid by a conveyance of real property. Rather, he proposed a method by which Bradley would give him and Land a $400,000 promissory note payable in a year and secured by 20 acres of the 103.1-acre tract she would own after the settlement. According to Johnston, the $400,000 figure represented a compromise from the amount of cash attorney fees proposed in the prior memo. The record shows that Bradley did not agree to these proposals.
