Firm obtains $1.6M judgment for clients in contract dispute over financial distributions
Following a bench trial, David Rich and Gregory Browne secured a $1.6 million damages award for two former employees of a real estate development company resulting from the owner’s breach of written agreements to share a percentage of future profits with the employees.
The total combined award to the firm’s clients, including prejudgment interest, is just under $2.6 million.
While employed by the real estate developer, the firm’s clients and the owner agreed through written contracts that the owner would distribute to them a percentage of the profits he made from two real estate projects, including after the clients’ employment ended.
Earlier in the case, a Suffolk Superior Court judge in the Business Litigation Session granted partial summary judgment to the firm’s clients – determining that the owner breached the agreements when he failed to continue making distributions, and rejecting the owner’s counterargument that the contracts terminated when the clients’ employment ended.
Following a subsequent bench trial on damages, the judge awarded $1.03 million to one of the firm’s clients, and just under $576,000 to the other client. The judge also determined that prejudgment interest started to run from the time of the breach.
Prior to trial, the judge granted the firm’s request to bar the owner from offering certain expert testimony, concluding that testimony premised upon the owner’s purportedly mistaken understanding of his ongoing contractual obligations was legally irrelevant to a breach of contract analysis.