Pearson v Chung

The Result

Roy Pearson, an administrative law judge in the District of Columbia, sued Soo Chung, a South Korean dry cleaner, for tens of millions of dollars, over a $10.50 pants alteration and a "satisfaction guaranteed" sign on their store.

He lost. Completely. It was a defense verdict from the judge and the dry cleaner's will get their costs. Pearson had even withdrawn his claim for the pants themselves, so he didn't even get the $1,500 for the pants that many observers thought that he might.

Attorneys' fees motions are pending; Pearson will clearly get no attorneys' fees, the dry clean has a decent shot at recovering his attorneys' fees for vexatious litigation and implied in prior court rulings and today's ruling. There were also implications that his claims lacked factual support and legal justification (i.e. that they were groundless and frivilous).

Almost everyone in the world who has heard about this case agrees that it is a sound ruling, although most incorrectly believed that there was a tiny claim for compensatory damages for that pants themselves present. May links above are to the Wall Street Journal which provided a full text ruling in the case on its website. Many people, are surprised that the case got to trial at all, however.

The Pre-Trial and Trial Proceedings

Like most famous tort reform cases, when all is said and done the result produced by the court system are not that extreme.

The clearly outrageous claimant who should have known better lost. An appeal wasn't necessary to get that result, although one suspects that Pearson will bring and lose an appeal in this case, as he has not shown a penchant for being a reasonable person. If Pearson ultimately ends up footing the dry cleaner's legal bills, as seems likely, this case may even turn out to be an economic wash in terms of direct costs for the dry cleaner.

The trial court was not particularly slow in handling the case. It was filed June 7, 2005, and arose out of an incident in May of 2005. It was resolved just over two years later. This is hardly fast, but with up to $67 milliion in dispute, haste wasn't in either party's interest.

Two key claims were knocked out prior to trial:

1. Common law fraud claims related to an "All Work Done on Premises" sign. These were dismised in a Motion for Summary Judgement on May 16, 2006, about eleven months after the case was filed.

2. A claim that Pearson represented persons other than himself as a private attorney general. This was ruled out by a court order on November 20, 2006.

The trial, of just two days (June 12-13), was not outragously long or involved by civil litigation standards. According to the ruling:

At trial, the plaintiff presented the tesitmony of nine witnesses [including himself] . . . The defendants presented three witnesses . . . The plaintiff offered more than 100 exhibits, of which 66 were admitted into evidence; the defendants offered four exhibits, all of which were admitted into evidence.

A number of claims were kicked out in pre-verdict proceedings:

1. Claims related to a "Same Day Service" sign. It was dismissed at close of Plaintiff's case for lack of proof.

2. Claims for conversion or negligence related to the pants. The Court found that Pearson dropped the claim on the eve of trial.

By the time that the defense presented its case at trial, all that was left were statutory consumer protection and common law fraud claims related to the posting of a "satisfaction guaranteed" sign, seeking statutory, compensatory and punitive damages and injunctive relief.

The Court found at trial that Pearson hadn't even met his burden of proof to show that he didn't get his pants back, let alone show any intentional fraud, and that even his own witnesses did not back his case. The Court also found that "nothing in the law" supports Pearson's position regarding what a "satisfaction guaranteed" sign means. Those findings of fact doom any effort Pearson may make to appeal this case on any ground.

Lessons Learned

This case is still a cause celebre for tort reformers, and rightly so.

First, it is worth noting that more witnesses, more exhibits and more briefing do not inherently make a case stronger.

The findings of fact also foreclose legal analysis of the most interesting legal question in this case. Suppose that the dry cleaner really had intentionally cheated Pearson. Would he really be entitled to $54 million or more? U.S. Supreme Court precedent suggests otherwise, but that precedent wasn't clear enough to constrain the risk faced by the defendants before they had to roll the dice and go to trial.

The biggest problem with this case is the lack of clarity in what constitutes a separate offense in a consumer protection act claim for statutory damages. If statutory damages were limited to one statutory amount per party in cases brought by an individual, this would have been a $3,000ish case. Statutory damages are designed to provide more than de minimus compensation for almost nominal claims, not to provide major compensation for nominal cases.

The problem comes up with frequency in other areas of law too. Some of the harshest criminal sentences concern cases where a number of incidents that are part of a common plan or scheme are treated as separate offenses and given consecutive sentences.

It is also hard to tell why the claims related to "same day service" and "satisfaction guaranteed" signs weren't thrown out at the Motion for Summary Judgment stage, a year earlier, although it is easy to see why the case went to trial once those claims were upheld at the Motion for Summary Judgment stage. A denial of a motion for summary judgment cannot be appealed. It turns out that there was no evidence to back a "same day service" sign claim, and that the "satisfaction guaranteed" sign meant something very different than what was alleged under the law. If those claims had been thrown out, this would have gone to trial as a $1,500 case, not a $54 million case, and it wouldn't have made headlines.

Delaying a ruling in favor of the dry cleaners on these claims by a year is what brought this case notoriety. So too, does the failure of the court (in part because there is no good procedural way to do it) to lay out the relevant law prior to trial on matters where there are disputed issues of fact. On claims not resolved by motions for summary judgment, parties generally aren't given definitive legal rulings until after all or most of the facts are in. This means parties preparing for trial have to be ready for anything and have a moving target to case in terms of what they must prove in any case that is remotely novel. An advanced ruling on what "satisfaction guaranteed" means would have significantly changed the climate of the trial and the sense that the Court wasn't being proactive enough in controlling the case.

Pre-trial motions in limine regarding admissiblity of evidence are routine, but pre-trial motions regarding legal standards to apply to a case are far more rare. They shouldn't be.

Hat Tip to How Appealing for the links.