Lawyers Title Company, LLC v. Kingdom Title Solutions, Inc.

592 F. App'x 345
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedOctober 29, 2014
Docket13-3821, 13-3853
StatusUnpublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 592 F. App'x 345 (Lawyers Title Company, LLC v. Kingdom Title Solutions, Inc.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Lawyers Title Company, LLC v. Kingdom Title Solutions, Inc., 592 F. App'x 345 (6th Cir. 2014).

Opinions

ALICE M. BATCHELDER, Circuit Judge.

Appellant Lawyers Title Company, LLC (“Lawyers”) appeals the district court’s award of partial summary judgment and judgment as a matter of law to Appellee Sarah Bittinger and summary judgment to Appellee Kingdom Title Solutions, Inc. (“Kingdom”), on claims related to the decline in revenue of Lawyers’s Medina, Ohio office. Bittinger cross-appeals, arguing that the amount of the jury’s damages award on Lawyers’s surviving claims is excessive. We affirm the district court’s grant of partial summary judgment and judgment as a matter of law to Bittinger, its grant of summary judgment to Kingdom, and its denial of Bittinger’s renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law seeking a reduction in damages.

I.

Lawyers provides title insurance and escrow services for real estate transactions. Sarah Bittinger was Lawyers’s Medina, Ohio, office manager, and Debbie Fratta-roli was the office’s escrow officer. Neither employee’s employment agreement contained a non-compete provision. The district court found that

title insurance services are substantially similar across the industry. Like attorneys, title insurance salespeople often have a client base who will follow them from employer to employer.' Customers look for service and service is more directly associated with employees rather than with title insurance underwriters.

Accordingly, Lawyers refers to Bittinger and Frattaroli as “revenue-attached employees.”

Lawyers’s competitor — Kingdom—decided to make inroads into the insurance and escrow services business in Medina. To that end, Kingdom began recruiting Bittinger to run Kingdom’s new Medina office. In April 2012, while Bittinger was still employed by Lawyers, Kingdom’s president Brian Moore offered Bittinger a job as a sales representative; Bittinger suggested that Moore consider hiring Frattaroli too, explaining that Frattaroli was the “great escrow officer” Kingdom needed. Moore suggested that Bittinger could offer employment to Frattaroli.

[348]*348When Bittinger told Frattaroli that she was considering leaving Lawyers for Kingdom, Frattaroli was upset, ostensibly because a significant amount of business would leave with Bittinger. Frattaroli refused to leave Lawyers, so Bittinger told Moore that she was not yet ready to “abandon ship.”

Bittinger and Moore met again in May 2012; during that meeting Moore outlined the details of the job offer and officially offered a job to Bittinger. Bittinger reiterated that she wanted Frattaroli to come with her to Kingdom, and Moore told Bit-tinger that she could offer Frattaroli a position. Frattaroli again declined the position. Although the record is unclear on this point, it appears that Bittinger also declined the position after Frattaroli’s refusal.

Moore soon offered Bittinger an even more lucrative opportunity, which included an equity stake in Kingdom’s Medina office. He reiterated that Bittinger could offer a job to Frattaroli. Sometime during June 5-7 and before Bittinger accepted Kingdom’s offer, Bittinger offered Fratta-roli a job with an even higher salary, and this time Frattaroli “accepted right there on the spot.” On June 7, 2012, Bittinger signed an operating agreement with Kingdom.

Bittinger and Frattaroli continued their employment with Lawyers through June 22, 2012. When viewed in the light most favorable to Lawyers, the record reveals that during her period of dual employment, Bittinger transferred a number of purchase agreements from Lawyers to-Kingdom, told several repeat customers of her impending departure, and deleted certain emails and contacts from her Lawyers computer prior to leaving.

The district court granted Kingdom’s motion for summary judgment on all of Lawyers’s claims. The district court also granted Bittinger’s motion for summary judgment except on Lawyers’s claim for tortious interference with business relations, and breach of her duties for “disloyal acts between June 6, 2012 and June 22, 2012 and any damages proximately caused by those acts.” These claims proceeded to trial.

At trial, the district court sustained an objection to testimony Lawyers elicited .about Lawyers’s lost profits between September and December 2012. The district court reasoned that such testimony was “outside the timeline for these loans, and beyond that I think it is just testimony about damages he believes may have flowed from the fact that she exercised the, the right she had to leave the office, because she had gone.” The court, however, did permit Lawyers to submit a written offer of proof with respect to these damages.

The district court sua sponte deleted a punitive-damages jury instruction, stating: “I don’t think there is sufficient evidence to support giving it to the jury, so I intentionally deleted the punitives. I don’t think there is a sufficient showing of malice to support the request for a punitive damage instruction.” Lawyers objected.

The jury found Bittinger liable and awarded Lawyers $13,028.00. It also found in favor of Frattaroli.

After the verdict, Bittinger renewed her motion for judgment as a matter of law, arguing that that the jury’s verdict should be capped at the value of the six contracts with which the jury could have found she interfered ($3,263.00), and that the additional damage award was without evidentiary support. The court denied Bittinger’s motion, stating that although “the evidence supporting a higher award is significantly more vague,” “[t]he jury could have concluded that some portion of [349]*349those lost profits was attributable to other tortious conduct by Bittinger, such as warehousing of orders or comments she made encouraging customers not to do business with Lawyers while she was still employed there.”

Lawyers appeals the adverse summary judgment rulings, and Bittinger cross-appeals the district court’s denial of her renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law. Lawyers does not appeal the judgment as it applies to Frattaroli.

II.

We review de novo a district court’s summary judgment order. See Lexicon, Inc. v. Safeco Ins. Co. of Am., Inc., 436 F.3d 662, 670 (6th Cir.2006); see also Schultz v. Newsweek, Inc., 668 F.2d 911, 917 (6th Cir.1982) (“Summary judgment practice in federal district courts is controlled by Rule 56, unaffected by state procedural rules.”). Summary judgment is appropriate only “if the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Fed. R.Civ.P. 56(a). “The burden is generally on the moving party to show that no genuine issue of material fact exists, but that burden may be discharged by ‘showing— that is, pointing out to the district court— that there is an absence of evidence to support the nonmoving party’s case.’ ” Bennett v. City of Eastpointe, 410 F.3d 810, 817 (6th Cir.2005) (quoting Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S. 317, 325, 106 S.Ct. 2548, 91 L.Ed.2d 265 (1986)).

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592 F. App'x 345, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/lawyers-title-company-llc-v-kingdom-title-solutions-inc-ca6-2014.