Loss of Earning Capacity and The Self-Employed Plaintiff: What Damages Are Recoverable (IL 4th Dist. Case Note)

The plaintiff in Keiser-Long v. Owens, 2015 IL App (4th) 140612, a self-employed cattle buyer, sued for injuries she suffered in a car accident with the defendant.  The defendant admitted negligence and the parties went to trial on damages.

The defendant successfully moved for a directed verdict on plaintiff’s attempt to recover for lost earning capacity at trial and the Plaintiff appealed.

Reversing, the Fourth District appeals court expanded on the potential damages a personal injury claimant can recover where the plaintiff is self-employed and doesn’t draw a formal salary from the business she operates.

Illinois allows a plaintiff in a negligence suit to recover all damages that naturally flow from the commission of a tort.  Impaired earning capacity is a proper element of damages in a personal injury suit.  However, recovery is limited to loss that is reasonably certain to occur.  Lost earning capacity damages are measured by the difference between (a) the amount a plaintiff was capable of earning before her injury; and (b) the amount she is able to earn post-accident.

Lost earning capacity damages focus on an injured person’s ability to earn money instead of what she actually earned before an injury.  That said, a plaintiff pre- and post-accident earnings are relevant to a plaintiff’s damages computation.  ¶ 37.

Where a plaintiff is self-employed, a court can consider the plaintiff’s company’s diminution of profits as evidence of a plaintiff’s monetary damages where the plaintiff’s services are the dominant factor in producing profits.  By contrast, where a self-employed plaintiff’s involvement is passive and she relies on the work of others to make the company profitable, a profits reduction is not a proper damage element in a personal injury action.

The trial court granted the defendant’s motion for directed verdict since the plaintiff failed to present evidence that she lost income in the form of a salary or bonus from her cattle-buying business.

The appeals court reversed.  It noted that the plaintiff was solely responsible for her company’s profits and was the only one who travelled around the State visiting various cattle auctions and meeting with cattle sellers.  Plaintiff also offered expert testimony that she missed out on the chance to earn some $200,000/year in the years following the accident and that any company profits were labeled “retained earnings” and treated as the plaintiff’s personal retirement plan  ¶¶ 41-43.

The court held that since the plaintiff was the only one whose efforts dictated whether her cattle buying business was profitable or not, her business’s post-accident balance sheet was relevant to her recoverable damages.

The court also rejected the defendant’s argument that since plaintiff’s company was a C corporation (and not an S corp.1), profits and losses did not flow through to the plaintiff, the court should not have considered lost business income as an element of plaintiff’s damages.  The court found that any tax differences between C and S corporations were irrelevant since plaintiff was the cattle company for all intents and purposes.  As a result, any loss suffered by the company was tantamount to monetary loss suffered by the plaintiff.  ¶¶ 45-46.

The court’s final reason for reversing the trial court was a policy one.  Since the plaintiff’s corporation couldn’t sue the defendant, there was no potential for double recovery.  In addition, if the court prevented the plaintiff from recovering just because she didn’t earn a formal salary, this would operate as an unfair windfall for the defendant.  The end result is now the parties must have a retrial on the issue of plaintiff’s lost earning capacity.  ¶¶ 46-47.

Afterwords:

Owens provides a useful synopsis of when impaired earning capacity can be recovered in a personal injury suit.  In the context of a self-employed plaintiff, a plaintiff’s failure to draw a salary per se will not foreclose her from recovering damages; especially where the plaintiff – and not someone working for her – is the one mainly responsible for company profits.  In cases where the plaintiff is self-employed and is singularly responsible for a company’s profits, a loss in business income can be imputed to the defendant and awarded to the business-owner plaintiff.

———————————–

1  A C corporation is taxed at both the corporate level and at the shareholder level.  By contrast, an S corporation is not taxed at the corporate level; it’s only taxed at the shareholder individually. (This is colloquially termed “flow-through taxation.”)

Statute of Limitations and Installment Contracts: What is the Date of Breach and When Does the Limitations Period Start to Run – An IL Case Note

The statute of limitations defense and the equitable doctrine of laches are firmly-entrenched legal devices aimed at fostering finality in litigation.  The limitations and laches defenses both look to the length of time a plaintiff took to file suit and strive to balance a plaintiff’s right to have his claim heard on the merits with a defendant’s competing right to timely defend a lawsuit.

The inherent tension between the goals advanced by the limitations and laches defenses and the legal principle that everyone should have his or her day in court comes into sharp relief in cases involving multi-year contracts that are to be performed over time like a contract payable in annual installments.

Akhtert v. D’avis, 2013 IL App(1st) 113556-U, serves as a recent example of how difficult it can be to apply the statute of limitations and laches defenses where an oral contract doesn’t provide a clear end date and where it calls for yearly installment payments.

The oral agreement there provided that the defendant would use plaintiff’s medical facility to treat defendant’s patients in exchange for paying plaintiff between 40-50% of defendant’s gross income.  The defendant made monthly payments for about two years (from 2002-2004) and stopped.

The plaintiff didn’t sue until nearly seven years later (in 2011) and sought several years’ worth of payments it claimed it was owed by the defendant.  The defendant moved to dismiss plaintiff’s breach of contract claim on statute of limitations grounds and sought dismissal of plaintiff’s accounting action based on laches.  The trial court dismissed plaintiff’s claims as untimely and plaintiff appealed.

Held: Reversed in part.

Q: Why?

A: The court first held that the plaintiff’s breach of contract was timely as to all payments due within five years of the complaint’s 2011 filing date.

The statute of limitations for oral contracts in Illinois is five years, measured from the date where a creditor can legally demand payment from a debtor. 735 ILCS 13-205, (¶14).  Where a money obligation is payable in installments, the limitations period begins to run against each installment on the date the installment becomes due.  Each installment carries its own limitations period.

So, if you have a 2000 oral contract calling for annual payments starting in 2001 and wait until August 31, 2015 to sue, the suit will still be timely as to payments coming due within five years of the filing date (e.g. for all payments due on or after August 31, 2010).

Here, the court found the plaintiff’s suit was timely as to payments coming due on or after March 8, 2006 – five years preceding the 2011 complaint filing date.  Any payments due before March 8, 2006 were time-barred.

Next, the court addressed the defendant’s laches argument – asserted as a defense to plaintiff’s equitable accounting claim.  Laches is a “neglect or omission to assert a right, taken in conjunction with a lapse of time of more or less duration, and other circumstances causing prejudice to an adverse party” and applies where a plaintiff is seeking equitable (as opposed to legal or monetary relief). (¶ 25).

Laches applies where (1) a plaintiff files suit, (2) the plaintiff delays in filing the suit despite having notice of the existence of his claim, (3) the defendant lacks knowledge or notice of the existence of plaintiff’s claim, and (4) injury or prejudice resulting to the defendant by the plaintiff’s delay in filing suit.  Where the period of delay in bringing suit exceeds the applicable limitations period (here – the five-year period for breach of oral contracts), that delay will automatically constitutes laches.

The burden of showing laches is squarely on the defendant.  The mere lapse of time (between plaintiff’s knowledge of facts giving rise to a claim and plaintiff’s filing suit) isn’t enough.  The defendant must also show prejudice: that it is unfair to make him defend plaintiff’s delayed suit.

Here, the defendant couldn’t establish any unfairness in having to defend against plaintiff’s claims so it’s laches claim failed as to payments due within five years of the complaint filing date.

Take-aways:

Contracts payable in installments provide a separate limitations period for each breach;

An oral installment contract claim will be timely as to any payments pre-dating complaint date by five years;

Laches requires more than passage of time/delay between when a plaintiff is first armed with facts giving him a claim and when he actually files suit.  A defendant must also show prejudice – such as inability to track down witnesses and documents – in his ability to mount a defense based on the plaintiff’s lag time in bringing a claim to state a winning laches defense.

 

 

Commercial Landlord Not Entitled to Double Rent Under Holdover Statute Where Tenant Had Legitimate Belief It Had Right to Possess Space – IL 1st Dist.

I’ve written on here before about how a tenant holding over after a lease expires can lead to a serious case of option paralysis for the landlord.  Questions abound in rapid-fire fashion: should the landlord accept the holdover and continue the lease on the same terms as before? Should the landlord seek double rent under the forcible statute?  Should the landlord refuse to cash any rent checks from the tenant after the lease expires?  What if the landlord desperately needs that post-expiration rent payment?  These are all issues that need to be addressed.  And fast. 

Spatz v. 2263 North Lincoln Corporation, 2013 IL App (1st) 122076, a somewhat dated but relevant case, examines the requirements for a holdover tenancy and the features of an enforceable option to purchase in the context of a commercial lease dispute.

That case’s plaintiff, a successor property owner (to the original landlord), sued the commercial tenant for eviction and past rent damages. The tenant defended the suit, and argued that it exercised an option to purchase the premises from the plaintiff’s predecessor before the lawsuit was filed and therefore was immune from eviction.

The trial court sided with the plaintiff awarding it possession and rental damages but only awarding about half of its claimed attorneys’ fees. The court also denied plaintiff’s request for double rent under Illinois’ holdover statute (735 ILCS 5/9-202).  Both sides appealed.

Affirming the possession order, the appeals court rejected the defendant’s argument that it exercised a purchase option on the property and was therefore a property vendee rather than a lessee.

In Illinois, where a lease contains a purchase option, and the option is exercised and accepted according to its terms, there is no longer a lease.  What results instead is a present contract for the sale of the property.  The parties relationship then morphs from a landlord-tenant one to a vendor-vendee one.  The lessee (now the vendee) then has no further lease obligations.

However, the lessee must exercise the option to purchase to the property in exact conformance with the option. If it fails to do so, the option is deemed unexercised and the landlord can pursue rights under the lease. (¶¶ 27-28).

Here, the court found that the lessee’s purported acceptance of the purchase option was too conditional to be considered a proper exercise of the option.

The court next held that the lessor failed to extend the lease or create a holdover tenancy by accepting partial rent payments from the tenant after the lessor served its 30-day termination notice.

Under Illinois law landlord-tenant law, it is the landlord’s intention, not the tenant’s, that determines whether a holdover tenancy is created. While a landlord’s acceptance of rent following the expiration of a lease can be viewed as an intent to treat a tenant as a holdover, a court objectively looks to landlord’s other conduct – such as efforts to regain the premises – to determine whether the landlord intended to treat a tenant as a holdover. (¶ 37)

The lease specifically allowed the landlord to accept post-default rent payments without extending the lease.  In addition, the landlord sued to evict the defendant. Taken together, this served as clear evidence of a landlord’s intent not to treat the tenant as a holdover.

The First District also affirmed the trial court’s denial of the plaintiff’s claim for double rent under Section 9-202 of the Forcible Statute.

This statute allows a landlord to recover double rent where a tenant willfully holds over. The statute is penal in nature and only applies where a tenant stays in possession in bad faith – basically where it knows it has no right to stay after the lease ends. (¶¶ 44-45).

Where a tenant stays on site “for colorably justifiable reasons” (i.e., under a reasonable claim of right), the landlord cannot recover double rent under the willfully holding over statute. (¶ 44)

Here, the tenant offered evidence at trial showing that it had a legitimate dispute as to whether it had a right to stay in possession after lease expires. Consequently, the appeals court affirmed the trial court’s finding against the landlord on the double rent issue.

Afterwords:

1/ An option to purchase must be exercised in strict conformity with the purchase option;

2/ For a lessor to recover double rent under the holdover statute, the lessor must prove the lessee’s willfull conduct: that the lessee refused to vacate the premises without a good faith basis for doing so;

3/ 30-days’ written notice is required to terminate a month-to-month tenancy.