A fight between two former business partners who made tens of millions of dollars together building a futures prop firm in Austin before the relationship soured and spilled into separate fights in state and federal court in Texas recently ended in rare fashion.
The plaintiff, Leo Riot, who in December 2024 had accused Darrell Martin and John Skelton, his former partners at Apex Trader Funding, of defrauding him, breaching contracts and misappropriating his intellectual property, issued a public statement in August conceding none of his claims were true.
Riot, a former professional vert skater and X Games competitor turned software engineer, wrote that Apex and its executives “are not liable on any state or federal claims asserted by me” in the three-page statement.
“I understand judgment will soon be entered in the cases in favor of Apex and the defendants on all claims that I have asserted, and against me and the other plaintiffs for breach of contract,” he wrote. “I have agreed that such judgments are correct and appropriate.”
In one of the last cases adjudicated by U.S. District Judge Alan Albright before he left the bench, the parties entered a stipulated judgment Aug. 20.
“Plaintiffs stipulate and the court finds that plaintiffs’ claims against Apex are without merit, and that Apex is entitled to judgment in its favor on all such claims,” the judgment reads. “Plaintiffs stipulate and the court finds that all allegations asserted in this case concerning Apex’s supposed ‘fraud’ or ‘swindling’ of any customers, affiliates, or any other persons are without merit or basis in fact.”
Apex’s lead defense lawyers, Travis DeArman of Vartabedian Katz Hester & Haynes, who has been practicing for 16 years, and Robert Morris of Morris Law Group, who has been practicing for 31 years, recently told The Texas Lawbook that the case ranks highly in career achievements for them both.
“This is by far my proudest professional achievement,” DeArman said. “This was a bet-the-company case for a client that has just been fantastic throughout. The stakes were enormous. We were up against some of the biggest and best law firms in the country. It was the hardest fought battle that I’ve had to fight. And to come to an end of this kind was really the proudest moment I’ve ever had. … [I]t’s the crowning achievement of my career so far.”
Morris said it was “the most unique set of results and the most positive results I’ve ever gotten out of a settlement.” Putting this result into context, Morris recalled a case he took all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court that he lost, immortalized in the pages of The New York Times.
“I’ve been from one end of the spectrum to the other,” he said. “I’ve settled cases, and my clients have gotten over half a billion dollars in all those cases. And without a doubt, this case blows them away.”
Counsel for Riot did not respond to a request for comment.
The Beginning
It was before the founding of Apex Trader Funding in 2021 that Martin came into contact with Riot. Riot was a customer of one of Martin’s earlier companies, Apex Investing, which focused on teaching people how to trade.
“Leo noticed something that maybe wasn’t quite working exactly the way that Leo thought it could work, and he reached out to Darrell and said ‘Hey, I can fix that.’ And eventually they started kind of working together,” Morris said. “He fixed little things here and there, and that was how it became more than just Leo being on the system as a customer.”
Soon after that, Martin and his longtime friend and business partner, Skelton, decided to launch Apex Trader Funding because, as traders themselves, they felt that the market was not meeting a need and that they could build a superior prop firm platform.
But they needed a programmer.
Enter Riot.
“And Darrell brought Leo in and said ‘Let’s found a prop firm, or a futures funding firm, that can outperform what’s in the market,’” DeArman recalled in a recent interview. “And I don’t think anyone at the time — 2020, 2021 — understood exactly how successful they would be.”
So they put a deal into writing in April 2022 under which Riot was entitled to 33 percent of Apex’s net profits, according to court documents.
The growth and success of Apex came quickly, and for several months, the relationship between Riot, Martin and Skelton continued amicably.
Despite that success, Apex would later tell the court in counterclaims, Riot became “increasingly erratic” and began perpetrating a “multi-year scheme to misappropriate Apex’s source code and other critical property and infrastructure” and “attempted to sabotage Apex’s servers and systems.”
The sabotage caused website outages, resulted in a “dramatic” reduction in sales and increased Apex’s operating costs by several million dollars, the lawsuit alleges.
Apex told the court Riot used that intellectual property to launch his own competing prop firm, Day Traders.
“Stated differently, by June 2024, Riot had taken Apex hostage,” the lawsuit reads. “He then began to make demands. For example, he threatened to shut down Apex’s entire business unless Apex would agree to transfer its code and other intellectual property to Riot — in direct contravention of the programming agreement.”
Rather than running to the courthouse to resolve the dispute, Martin and Skelton directed their lawyers to engage with Riot to enter a series of new contracts that would enable him to continue operating the competing website, return control of Apex’s intellectual property to the firm and also let Riot to license one piece of software he developed to Apex.
And in July 2024, the parties signed off on a transition agreement and an exit agreement to that effect.
Avoiding litigation, DeArman said, “was a goal that we hoped to achieve and thought we had achieved.”
Five months later, it became clear that the peaceful ending the lawyers believed they had negotiated was not lasting.
“I remember getting the call from Morris, it was right after Christmas in 2024, that Apex was being sued,” DeArman said. “I was almost in disbelief that something so foolish was happening after all the work we did to avoid it.”
‘The Litigator and the Peacemaker’
In December 2024, Apex was facing two lawsuits: one filed by Riot in federal court, seeking relief that would effectively shut down the company, and another filed in Travis County district court by the COO of Daytraders, Martin Montano, who Riot later admitted he had “coordinated with” to file the claims that Apex was failing to pay commissions owed under an affiliate program.
“We were kind of surprised when, all of the sudden, they filed the two lawsuits,” Morris said. “… They wanted to close Apex down. That’s what they requested in the beginning. And just, thank God the judge thought that was as crazy as we did.”
Morris was heavily involved in negotiating agreements that would end the fighting and create a lasting peace for Apex and Riot.
“He’s a litigator and I’m the peacemaker, at some level,” he said of his work on this case with DeArman. “It’s kind of that arrangement. But when it came time for litigation, Travis and I worked together better than any two gears I’ve ever seen grind together to make incredible results for one of the most deserving clients I’ve ever had the pleasure and honor to work with.”
DeArman had a similar take on their relationship as cocounsel, calling Morris the “peacetime consigliere” and himself the “wartime consigliere.”
The litigation with Riot was contentious nearly from the start, the lawyers said. Within days of a temporary restraining order hearing where the judge ordered the parties not to destroy evidence, Apex’s lawyers would file a motion for contempt, accusing Riot of violating the order.
“That was one of the most amazing things,” Morris said. “They went to court, demanding an order so that no one destroys documents, and less than a week later he was destroying documents. Still, to this day, it blows my mind.”
Riot, who during most of the case was represented by a team of lawyers from Quinn Emanuel, would draw more motions for sanctions from Apex’s lawyers during the litigation.
On Sept. 14, 2025, according to the stipulated judgment, Apex served Riot with a Rule 11 motion for sanctions. Three days later, Quinn Emanuel was terminated, and lawyers with Bartlit Beck became Riot’s new counsel.
“Thereafter, plaintiffs invoked the safe-harbor provisions of Rule 11(c)(2) agreed to withdraw certain claims and allegations, including without limitation Riot’s claims for trade secret misappropriation and all allegations concerning Apex’s supposed ‘fraud’ against its customers or affiliates,” the stipulated judgment reads.
The Next Battlefront
In his public statement, Riot also admitted to sending to a social media influencer a two-minute video he had spliced and edited together from a three-hour meeting between Apex executives.
“I sent the edited video to Kelly Ann Marlin to publish for the purpose of casting Apex and Skelton in a false, negative light,” Riot wrote. “The edited video was not accurate.”
Specifically, the edited video appeared to show Skelton talking about attacking Apex’s customers, when in actuality the conversation was about attacking a handful of “fraudsters” who were abusing the platform, Morris said.
“To further correct the record, I admit that Apex, Martin and Skelton did not engage in any ‘fraud,’ ‘rug pulls’ or otherwise defraud Apex’s customers,” Riot wrote in his statement. “To my knowledge, all payout denials by Apex were not fraudulent. All allegations I made in the federal case concerning any such fraud by Apex, Martin or Skelton are not true.”
But that video, still circulating online, is currently being used by two former Apex customers in litigation against Apex, alleging they have been defrauded. Apex’s lawyers were successful in getting Riot’s lawyers to remove that allegation, and many others, under Rule 11’s safe harbor provision in order to avoid sanctions. However, references to the edited video are still contained in Riot’s second amended complaint.
“That’s in the public sphere forever,” DeArman said. “And there’s limited recourse.”
That’s part of the reason why DeArman and Morris said they wanted to speak out about this litigation now.
“We have been fighting, and are still fighting, to correct the record on this and fight back against the folks still out there trying to say untrue things,” DeArman said. “That campaign is ongoing.”
Riot is represented by Joseph Smith, Gabriel Levin, Katherine Swift, Joshua Ackerman, Nevin Gewertz, Michael Valaik and Nicolas Martinez of Bartlit Beck and Cynthia Saiter and Paige Amstutz of Scott, Douglass & McConnico.
Apex is also represented by Gary Cruciani and Tyler Freeman of Vartabedian Katz Hester Haynes and Robert Manley, Michael Catapano, Avery Williams, Patrick Pijls, Bradley Jarrett, Hannah Syburg, Emelia Duguay, Charles Fowler, Jacques Friedman, Veronica Manning, Lauren Simenauer and Frank Vecella of McKool Smith.
The case number is 1:24-cv-01557.