SAMPLE STUDENT PAPER
Mike Rosolino
BUSA 2106 1:30-2:45 - Professor Perry Binder
A. In the Superior Court of Fulton County, I found a case that had been filed the morning of September 29, 2005, which suited this assignment. The case included the plaintiff, Barter for Less, Inc., and the defendant, Adam Jacob, a former employee of the plaintiff. First, the complaint establishes the propriety of the venue by citing the residency of both the plaintiff and the defendant as Fulton County. In the case, Jacob, the defendant, is a sales agent whose sales had been steadily dropping.. Since Jacob received wages based on commission for the clients he brought to the company, he had been receiving less and less pay when he failed to bring customers to BFL. After expressing his discontent with his declining paycheck, Lon Passoff, the president and CEO of Barter for Less, Inc., offered Jacob an administrative position in the company, as well as a one percent ownership interest in the company. Jacob continued to complain and asked for a ten percent ownership interest in the company. Passoff would only agree to a situation where Jacob could work his way up to a ten percent ownership stock in the company; this offer, however, was not agreeable to Jacob. Passoff and Jacob agreed to release each other from all employment obligations, but Jacob later refused to sign the necessary release forms. Jacob left the company and went to Barter for Less, Inc.’s top competitor and a variety of clients to spread erroneous information that Barter for Less, Inc. was going out of business in the near future. This information was privileged regardless of its truth value but was identified as false by Passoff.
The transcript goes on to what seems to be the different matter of threatening phone calls made by Jacob to Passoff concerning the safety of Passoff’s family.
Now Passoff wants to sue for damages, all fees and court costs, and under a statute which states that punitive damages can be awarded only if the defendant’s actions were willful and showed malice.
B. The first interesting thing I found in the case was the very formal introductions including, “ Now Comes Plaintiff Barter for Less, Inc.” and the very thorough documentation of name references. Nearly a quarter of the first page of the report is devoted to clearing up who is who and how he will be identified in the rest of the document.
The complaint is in a step by step format presented in a very persuasive manner including some superfluous information, but made the prosecution’s case more appealing and further damaged the credibility of the defendant. I believe that this type of wording is to ensure that anyone reading the case as it is presented will side with the plaintiff, viewing the defendant’s motives as vengeful owing to his reduction in income.
One item in the listing of the counts that I did not understand was why after each count heading the transcript had to recapitulate everything that had been written until that point: “Plaintiff incorporates Paragraphs 1-15 as if restated verbatim herein.” It seems that since number one through fifteen had actually been stated earlier on that and subsequent pages, one need not repeat them. Throughout each count, the transcript spells out every single infraction and indicates how each infraction adds to the plaintiff’s case. In this way it seems the intended audience for the document would be jury members or others not highly educated in the ways of the law. Later in the document, under punitive damages the plaintiff “prays for punitive damages specifically plead pursuant to O. C. G. A. 51-12-5.1 (b), as permitted by Georgia law.” No ordinary individual without any legal background has any way of knowing what that means, and only after reading the statute several times could I understand its meaning. The actual audience of the complaint seems unclear based solely on the wording of the body of the complaint. A very unusual mixture of thoroughness and ambiguity seem to be the basis of the plaintiff’s tactics.
C. One of the things I noted as I read the complaint was the careful, deliberate inclusion of the defendant’s threatening telephone calls, a complaint better suited for the criminal courts. However, the reason for this inclusion, I believe, is to vilify Jacob’s character, and for the courts to view him as a “bad man” who will hurt innocent family members in order to get what he wants: money. Clearly, the plaintiff would like to suggest that any former employee who would make such dastardly telephone calls would be capable of malicious intent when discussing unprivileged information with competitors. The lawyers for the plaintiff clearly want to show that Jacob’s character is one where physical threats and psychological harm are part of his modus operandi. Proving that there was malicious and specific intent satisfies all requirements for the aforementioned statute and could increase the amount of money the plaintiff could recover, which is why the plaintiff sued for damages and any and all court fees..
The plaintiff sued Jacob for the same thing from three different angles. First, Jacob told untruths about Passoff’s company which resulted in a loss of revenue for his company, which could have drawn a lawsuit by itself. Second, Jacob revealed information that was privileged regardless of its truth value. Third, in revealing the information, Jacob did so with specific intent to harm Barter for Less, Inc; moreover, the counts are set up in such a way so as to compliment each other and remove doubt of their solidity. By specifically asking for a trial by jury, the attorney puts himself in a position to more effectively play on the emotions of the court. The attorney also puts himself in a position to explain to the jury in his own words exactly the interpretation of any mentioned statutes he wants them to hear, not necessarily to mislead, but to explain the statute in a way as to be most effective for the plaintiff and most detrimental to the defendant.