Justia Contracts Opinion Summaries

The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the judgment of the superior court judge granting summary judgment in favor of BSC Companies, Inc., BSC Group, Inc., and the companies' president (collectively, BSC) in this action brought by BSC's former employees alleging claims under the Prevailing Wage Act, Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 149, 26-27H, holding that the contracts at issue were not governed by the Act, and BSC was not required to pay its employees a prevailing wage pursuant to the contracts.At issue were two professional engineering services contracts awarded by the Department of Transportation (MassDOT) to BSC. The contracts were not competitively bid and were not awarded to the lowest bidder, unlike contracts for public works construction projects governed by the Act. Further, the contracts did not specify that BSC's employees would be paid at least a prevailing wage determined by the Department of Labor Standards. The superior court judge granted summary judgment to BSC. The Supreme Court affirmed, holding that Plaintiffs were not entitled to a prevailing wage for their work under the professional services contracts. View "Metcalf v. BSC Group, Inc." on Justia Law

The First Circuit affirmed the district court's order entering summary judgment in favor of Defendant with respect to Plaintiff's assertion that he was wrongfully deprived of thousands of dollars in commissions he alleged he was due, holding that there was no error.After he resigned, Plaintiff brought suit against Defendant, his former employer, asserting claims for nonpayment of wages under the Act, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and quantum meruit. Defendant successfully removed the action to federal district court, which granted summary judgment in favor of Defendant. The First Circuit affirmed, holding that the district court (1) did not err in granting in part Defendant's motion to strike certain portions of his response to the summary judgment motion; and (2) did not err in granting summary judgment against Plaintiff on his claims. View "Klauber v. VMware, Inc." on Justia Law

Two companies filed a lawsuit in federal court against two of their former employees, who had served in executive positions. The former executives responded by suing the companies in Florida state court. They later moved for summary judgment in the federal action. While that motion was pending, the companies moved for a voluntary dismissal without prejudice of their federal action, which the executives opposed. The district court granted the companies’ motion for voluntary dismissal, and it denied the executives’ request for attorney’s fees and costs incurred in defending the federal lawsuit to that point. On remand, the district court again granted the voluntary dismissal. The executives moved to alter or amend that judgment and be awarded fees and costs immediately, which the court denied. The executives appealed.   The Eleventh Circuit affirmed. The court explained that the district court sufficiently protected the executives from the prejudice of duplicative litigation by essentially inviting them to move for payment of their costs and fees if the companies ever refiled their federal lawsuit. The court adequately explained its reasoning for granting the dismissal without prejudice on that condition. In all aspects of the decision, the court acted within its discretion. View "Emergency Recovery, Inc., et al v. Bryan Hufnagle, et al" on Justia Law

Plaintiff, a former employee, sued on behalf of herself and similarly situated employees, claiming that St. Luke’s violated the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (“FLSA”) overtime provisions by failing to fully compensate employees for work performed. She also brought an unjust-enrichment claim under state law. The district court certified two classes with different lookback periods: (1) an FLSA collective comprised of employees who worked for St. Luke’s between September 2016 and September 2018, 1 and (2) an unjust-enrichment class comprised of all employees who worked for St. Luke’s in Missouri between April 2012 and September 2018. Houston also asserted individual claims, one under the Missouri Minimum Wage Law, and one for breach of her employment contract. The district court granted summary judgment to St. Luke’s on all claims.   The Eighth Circuit vacated and remanded. The court explained that Plaintiff has raised a genuine dispute that the rounding policy does not average out over time. The court explained that no matter how one slices the data, most employees and the employees as a whole fared worse under the rounding policy than had they been paid according to their exact time worked. Here, the rounding policy did both. It resulted in lost time for nearly two-thirds of employees, and those employees lost more time than was gained by their coworkers who benefited from rounding. The court concluded that the employees have raised a genuine dispute that the rounding policy, as applied, did not average out over time. The district court, therefore, erred in granting summary judgment on the FLSA and Missouri wage claims. View "Torri Houston v. St. Luke's Health System, Inc." on Justia Law

The First Circuit affirmed the rulings of the district court requiring Timothy Day to pay NuVasive, Inc., his former employer, more than $1.7 million in damages and attorney's fees for breach of contract and spoliation of evidence, holding that the district court did not err or abuse its discretion.NuVasive brought suit against Day making claims arising from Day's business interactions with NuVasive's customers on behalf of Alphatec Spine, Inc., Day's new employer, in violation of non-competition and non-solicitation obligations in Day's contract with NuVasive. After the district court entered its final judgment Day appealed, arguing that the court erred in finding the requisite causal nexus between Day's improper solicitations and the decisions of certain NuVasive customers to switch to Alphatec as their primary supplier of spine-related surgical products. The First Circuit affirmed, holding that there was no error in the damages award or the sanctions-based award of attorney's fees and costs. View "NuVasive, Inc. v. Day" on Justia Law

Plaintiff worked for Tug Hill Operating, LLC, for approximately a year and a half at rig sites in West Virginia. He commenced an action against Tug Hill under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), alleging that while Tug Hill formally classified him as an independent contractor, he actually qualified as an employee for purposes of the FLSA based on the degree of control that Tug Hill exercised over his work. He, therefore, claimed that Tug Hill was required to pay him overtime for those weeks in which he worked more than 40 hours. Tug Hill filed a motion to dismiss Plaintiff’s action on the ground that Plaintiff was contractually required to arbitrate his claim against it. In addition, RigUp itself filed a motion to intervene in order to seek the action’s dismissal in favor of arbitration. The district court granted both motions.   The Fourth Circuit reversed both rulings and remanded. The court explained that the numerous provisions in the Agreement preclude any conclusion that the Agreement was entered into solely or directly for the benefit of Tug Hill, such that Tug Hill could enforce it as a third-party beneficiary. Accordingly, the district court erred in granting Tug Hill’s motion to dismiss and compelling Plaintiff, under the arbitration agreement between him and RigUp, to proceed to arbitration with respect to his FLSA claim against Tug Hill. Moreover, the court explained that because RigUp’s agreement with Plaintiff expressly disclaimed any interest in any litigation, Plaintiff might have with a company in Tug Hill’s position RigUp cannot now opportunistically claim that intervention is necessary. View "Lastephen Rogers v. Tug Hill Operating, LLC" on Justia Law

Plaintiffs are twenty-six former employees of International Business Machines Corporation (“IBM”) who signed separation agreements requiring them to arbitrate any claims arising from their termination by IBM. The agreements set a deadline for initiating arbitration and included a confidentiality requirement. Plaintiffs missed the deadline but nonetheless tried to arbitrate claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (“ADEA”). Their arbitrations were dismissed as untimely. They then sued IBM in district court, seeking a declaration that the deadline is unenforceable because it does not incorporate the “piggybacking rule,” a judge-made exception to the ADEA’s administrative exhaustion requirements. Shortly after filing suit, Plaintiffs moved for summary judgment and attached various documents obtained by Plaintiffs’ counsel in other confidential arbitration proceedings. IBM moved to seal the confidential documents. The district court granted IBM’s motions to dismiss and seal the documents. On appeal, Plaintiffs argued that (1) the filing deadline in their separation agreements is unenforceable and (2) the district court abused its discretion by granting IBM’s motion to seal.   The Second Circuit affirmed. The court first wrote that the piggybacking rule does not apply to arbitration and, in any event, it is not a substantive right under the ADEA. Second, the court held that the presumption of public access to judicial documents is outweighed here by the Federal Arbitration Act’s (“FAA”) strong policy in favor of enforcing arbitral confidentiality provisions and the impropriety of counsel’s attempt to evade the agreement by attaching confidential documents to a premature motion for summary judgment. View "In re IBM Arb. Agreement Litig." on Justia Law

Andrew Hennessey appealed a district court order dismissing with prejudice his action against the Milnor School District (“District”). The District employed Hennessey as a teacher for the 2021-2022 school year. In October 2021, the District placed Hennessey on paid administrative leave for immoral conduct and conduct unbecoming his position. The District requested Hennessey sign a resignation letter, which would have immediately terminated his employment, salary, and benefits. He declined to sign the resignation letter and requested an administrative hearing. The District then converted Hennessey’s leave from paid to unpaid leave and recommended his dismissal for cause. Hennessey subsequently signed a severance agreement providing him salary through October 2021 and insurance benefits through December 2021, and waiving his rights to challenge the dismissal. He later learned through an open records request that the District’s legal counsel had advised the District in an email, in part, to convert his leave to unpaid to have “some leverage over this guy.” In December 2022, Hennessey filed this action seeking to rescind the agreement’s release and waiver section to allow him to challenge his dismissal. He claimed the District exerted undue financial pressure on him to secure the waiver of his rights to an administrative hearing and to challenge his termination in district court when it converted his paid leave to unpaid leave. The North Dakota Supreme Court affirmed, finding Hennessey failed to allege facts sufficient to support rescinding a contract for undue influence under N.D.C.C. § 9-09-02. View "Hennessey v. Milnor School District" on Justia Law

Bazemore, a Papa John’s delivery driver, sued under the Fair Labor Standards Act, alleging that the company had under-reimbursed his vehicle expenses. Papa John’s moved to compel arbitration, attaching a declaration from its “Director of People Services” that Papa John’s requires all new employees to sign an arbitration agreement as a condition of employment. She asserted that Bazemore signed the agreement electronically on October 10, 2019, by signing in using a user ID and password, then scrolling through the entire agreement and checking a box in order to sign. Bazemore swore under penalty of perjury that he “had never seen” the agreement and that he had seen his manager login for Bazemore and other delivery drivers “to complete training materials” for them. The court denied Bazemore’s request for targeted discovery as to whether he had actually signed the agreement and granted the motion to compel arbitration.The Sixth Circuit reversed. Under the Federal Arbitration Act, 9 U.S.C. 4, the party seeking arbitration must prove that such an agreement exists. Kentucky law governs whether Bazemore entered into an agreement and provides that an electronic signature is legally valid only when “made by the action of the person the signature purports to represent”—which is a question of fact. Bazemore’s testimony that he never saw the agreement was enough to create a genuine issue as to whether he signed it. View "Bazemore v. Papa John's U.S.A., Inc." on Justia Law

The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the superior court in favor of Plaintiff and declaring that the City of Woonsocket improperly terminated Plaintiff's employment with the Woonsocket Police Department in violation of R.I. Gen. Laws 42-28.6-4 of the Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights (LEOBOR), holding that there was no error.The order appealed from declared that the city's termination of Plaintiff's employment was unlawful in violation of section 42-28.6-4 of the LEOBOR and that the City must comply with LEOBOR's procedural requirements if it wished to terminate Plaintiff's employment. The Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the trial justice properly determined that the City improperly terminated Plaintiff's employment and improperly deprived him of the requisite notice and hearing. View "Sosa v. City of Woonsocket" on Justia Law