No Course of Dealing In Trucking Dispute – Attorneys’ Fees Language in Invoice Not Binding On Transport Co. (IL ND)

C&K Trucking, LLC v. AGL, LLC, 2015 WL 6756282, features a narcotic fact pattern and this legal issue: Can boilerplate “legalese” in an invoice create binding contract rights against the invoice recipient?

Whether the mere mention of this topic is sleep inducing will depend on the person.  But what I can say is that the question is a pertinent one from a commercial litigation standpoint since it continues to crop up pretty regularly in practice.

I’ve represented parties trying to enforce favorable invoice language while at other times, defended against one-sided invoice terms.  The main issue there, like in today’s featured case, is whether there was a meeting of the minds on the disputed invoice language.

The plaintiff transportation broker in C&K Trucking sued to recover damages for unpaid cargo brokerage services. The broker’s damages action was based on invoices that provided it could recover unpaid amounts in addition to interest and attorneys’ fees.

The problem was that the broker didn’t send its invoices until after it performed under a series of oral contracts with the trucking firm defendants.

The contracting chronology went like this: plaintiff broker verbally hired the defendant to transport cargo for the plaintiff’s clients.  Once the defendants delivered the cargo and was paid by the broker’s clients, the broker sent the defendants invoices that contained the disputed fee-shifting terms.

Defendants moved for summary judgment that the invoice attorneys’ fees provision weren’t enforceable since they (defendants) never agreed to fee-shifting at the outset.  The Northern District agreed and granted defendants’ summary judgment motion.  In doing so, the court relied on some fundamental contract formation principles and reiterated the quantum of evidence needed to survive a summary judgment motion.

In Federal court, the summary judgment movant must show the court that a trial is pointless – that there’s no disputed issue of fact. Once the movant meets this burden, the non-moving party must then show that the affidavits, depositions and admissions on file do in fact show there are “material” disputed facts that should be resolved at trial.

A disputed fact is material where it might affect the outcome of the suit. But a metaphysical doubt isn’t enough. If the evidence doesn’t show a true factual dispute, a summary judgment will be granted.

To establish the formation of a valid contract in Illinois, the plaintiff must prove there was an offer, an acceptance and valuable consideration.  The plaintiff must also establish that the contract’s main terms were definite and certain.

Any one-sided attempt to change terms of a contract by sending an invoice with additional terms that were never discussed by the parties will normally fail to create an enforceable contract. 

An exception to this applies where there is a course of dealing between the parties.  A course of dealing is defined as a continuous relationship between parties over time that, based on the parties’ conduct, reflects a mutual understanding of each party’s rights and duties concerning a particular transaction.  A course of dealing under contract law can inform or qualify written contract language.

In this case, the plaintiff argued that the defendants’ years-long pattern of accepting and paying plaintiff’s invoices established a course of dealing and evinced defendant’s implied acceptance of the invoice contents.  The court rejected this argument since there was no evidence that defendants ever paid the plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees through the life of the verbal contracts.  The court also pointed to the fact that defendants disputed many of plaintiff’s invoices as additional proof that there was no tacit acknowledgement by defendants that it was responsible for plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees.

Afterwords:

The key lesson from the factually unsexy C&K Trucking case is that boilerplate fee-shifting invoice terms sent after the contract is performed generally aren’t enforceable. There must be a meeting of the minds at the contract formation stage to allow fee-shifting.

A course of dealing based on the parties’ past conduct can sometimes serve as a proxy for explicit contract terms or a party’s acceptance of those terms.  However, where the parties’ prior transactions do not clearly show mutual assent to disputed language, the breach of contract plaintiff cannot rely on the course of dealing rule to prove a defendant’s implied acceptance.

 

 

 

Hotel Titan Escapes Multi-Million Dollar Fla. Judgment Where No Joint Venture in Breach of Contract Case

In today’s featured case, the plaintiff construction firm contracted with a vacation resort operator in the Bahamas partly owned by a Marriott hotel subsidiary. When the resort  breached the contract, the plaintiff sued and won a $7.5M default judgment in a Bahamas court. When that judgment proved uncollectable, the plaintiff sued to enforce the judgment in Florida state court against Marriott – arguing it was responsible for the judgment since it was part of a joint venture that owned the resort company.  The jury ruled in favor of the plaintiff and against Marriott who then appealed.

Reversing the judgment, the Florida appeals court first noted that under Florida law, a joint venture is an association of persons or legal entities to carry out a single enterprise for profit.

In addition to proving the single enterprise for profit, the joint venture plaintiff must demonstrate (i) a community of interest in the performance of the common purpose, (ii) joint control or right to control the venture; (iii) a joint proprietary interest in the subject matter of the venture; (4) the right to share in the profits; and (5) a duty to share in any losses that may be sustained.

All elements must be established. If only one is absent, there’s no joint venture – even if the parties intended to form a joint venture from the outset.

The formation of a corporation almost always signals there is no joint venture. This is because joint ventures generally follow partnership law which follows a different set of rules than do corporations. So, by definition, corporate shareholders cannot be joint venturers by definition.

Otherwise, a plaintiff could “have it both ways” and claim that a given business entity was both a corporation and a joint venture. This would defeat the liability-limiting function of the corporate form.

A hallmark of joint control in a joint venture context is mutual agency: the ability of one joint venturer to bind another concerning the venture’s subject matter.  The reverse is also true: where one party cannot bind the other, there is no joint venture.

Here, none of the alleged joint venturers had legal authority to bind the others within the scope of the joint venture. The plaintiff failed to offer any evidence of joint control over either the subject of the venture or the other venturers’ conduct.

There was also no proof that one joint venture participant could bind the others. Since Marriott was only a minority shareholder in the resort enterprise, the court found it didn’t exercise enough control over the defaulted resort to subject it (Marriott) to liability for the resort’s breach of contract.

The court also ruled in Marriott’s favor on the plaintiff’s fraudulent inducement claim premised on Marriott’s failure to disclose the resort’s precarious economic status in order to  entice the plaintiff to contract with the resort.

Under Florida law, a fraud in the inducement claim predicated on a failure to disclose material information requires a plaintiff to prove a defendant had a duty to disclose information. A duty to disclose can be found (1) where there is a fiduciary duty among parties; or (2) where a party partially discloses certain facts such that he should have to divulge the rest of the related facts known to it.

Here, neither situation applied. Marriott owed no fiduciary duty to the plaintiff and didn’t transmit incomplete information to the plaintiff that could saddle the hotel chain with a duty to disclose.

Take-aways:

A big economic victory for Marriott. Clearly the plaintiff was trying to fasten liability to a deep-pocketed defendant several layers removed from the breaching party. The case shows how strictly some courts will scrutinize a joint venture claim. If there is no joint control or mutual agency, there is no joint venture. Period.

The case also solidifies business tort axiom that a fraudulent inducement by silence claim will only prevail if there is a duty to disclose – which almost always requires the finding of a fiduciary relationship. In situations like here, where there is a high-dollar contract between sophisticated commercial entities, it will usually be impossible to prove a fiduciary relationship.

Source: Marriott International, Inc. v. American Bridge Bahamas, Ltd., 2015 WL 8936529

 

Stipulation In Earlier Case Subjects LLC Member to Unjust Enrichment and Constructive Trust Judgment in Check Cashing Dispute – IL 1st Dist.

In a densely fact-packed case that contains an exhausting procedural history, the First District recently provided guidance on the chief elements of the equitable unjust enrichment and constructive trust remedies.

National Union v. DiMucci’s (2015 IL App (1st) 122725) back story centers around an anchor commercial tenant’s (Montgomery Ward) bankruptcy filing and its corporate landlord’s allowed claim for about $640K in defaulted lease payments.  In the bankruptcy case, the landlord assigned its approved claim by written stipulation to its lender whom it owed approximately $16M under a defaulted development loan.

The bankruptcy court paid $640K to the landlord who, instead of assigning it to the lender, pocketed the check.  The lender’s insurer then filed a state court action against the landlord’s officer (who deposited the funds in his personal account) to recover the $640K paid to the landlord in the Montgomery Ward bankruptcy.  After the trial court granted summary judgment for the plaintiff on its unjust enrichment and constructive trust counts, the defendant appealed.

Affirming the trial court’s judgment for the plaintiff, the First District first focused on the importance of the stipulation signed by the landlord in the prior bankruptcy case. The court rejected the landlord’s argument that his attorney in the bankruptcy case lacked authority to stipulate that the landlord would assign its $640K claim to the plaintiff’s insured (the lender). 

A stipulation is considered a judicial admission that cannot be contradicted by a party.  But it is only considered a judicial admission in the case in which it’s filed.  In a later case, the earlier stipulation is an evidentiary admission that can be explained away.

The law is also clear that a party is normally bound by his attorney’s entry into a stipulation on the party’s behalf. This holds true even where the attorney makes a mistake or is negligent.  Where an attorney lacks a client’s express authority, a client is still bound by his attorney’s conduct where the client fails to promptly seek relief from the stipulation. To undo a stipulation entered into by its attorney, a party must make a clear showing that the stipulated matter was untrue. Since the landlord failed to meet this elevated burden of invalidating the stipulation, the court held the landlord to the terms of the stipulation and ruled that it should have turned over the $640K to the plaintiff.

Unjust Enrichment and LLC Act

Next, the court examined the plaintiff’s unjust enrichment count. Unjust enrichment requires a plaintiff to show a defendant retained a benefit to plaintiff’s detriment and that the retention of the benefit violates basic principles of fairness. Where an unjust enrichment claim is based on a benefit being conferred on a defendant by an intermediary (here, the bankruptcy agent responsible for paying claims), the plaintiff must show (1) the benefit should have been given to the plaintiff but was mistakenly given to the defendant, (2) the defendant obtained the benefit from the third party via wrongful conduct, or (3) where plaintiff has a better claim to the benefit than does the defendant. (¶ 67)

Scenario (1) – benefit mistakenly given to defendant – clearly applied here. The bankruptcy court agent paid the landlord’s agent by mistake when the payment should have gone to the plaintiff pursuant to the stipulation.

The court also rejected defendant’s claim that he wasn’t liable under the Illinois LLC Act which immunizes LLC members from company obligations.  805 ILCS 180/10-10.  However, since plaintiff sued the defendant in his individual capacity for his own wrongful conduct (depositing a check in his personal account), the LLC Act didn’t protect the defendant from unjust enrichment liability.

Constructive Trust

The First District then affirmed the trial court’s imposition of a constructive trust on the $640K check.  A constructive trust is an equitable remedy applied to correct unjust enrichment. A constructive trust is generally created where there is fraudulent conduct by a defendant, a breach of fiduciary duty or when duress, coercion or mistake is present. While a defendant’s wrongful conduct is usually required for a court to impose a constructive trust, this isn’t always so. The key inquiry is whether it is unfair to allow a party to retain possession of property – regardless of whether the party has possession based on wrongful conduct or by mistake.

Here, the defendant failed to offer any evidence other than his own affidavit to dispute the fact that he wrongfully deposited funds that should have gone to the plaintiff; the court noting that under Supreme Court Rule 191, self-serving and conclusory affidavits aren’t enough to defeat summary judgment. (¶¶ 75-77)

Take-aways:

This case offers a useful synopsis of two fairly common equitable remedies – unjust enrichment and the constructive trust device – in a complex fact pattern involving multiple parties and diffuse legal proceedings.

The case makes clear that a party will be bound by his attorney’s conduct in signing a stipulation on the party’s behalf and that if a litigant wishes to nullify unauthorized attorney conduct, he carries a heavy burden of proof.