What Is Tortious Interference? Part 5

Transcript

Hi, I'm Regina Campbell. I'm the managing attorney here at The Campbell Law Group, coming to you again from Coral Gables, Florida. Hope everyone's having a beautiful day. We want to take this opportunity to wrap up a series that we've been doing. This is part five of the tortious interference series, and we're going to talk a little bit today about damages.

As I've indicated in the prior segments, damages is one of the hardest elements to prove, in addition to causation, when we're referring to either kind of tortious interference, whether it's with an economic or advantageous business relationship or with a contractual relationship. Primarily that's because, once again, you have to have the connection between the acts and the actual damages. So you have the acts and the original elements, whether it's knowledge about a contract or an economic relationship and intentional behavior to interfere with it, and then of course showing that these particular behaviors contributed specifically to the interference and actually caused it. Then you have to prove how much it cost. What kind of damages did that person cost you by behaving in this manner?

Sometimes it's nominal. Sometimes they may have just caused you a difficult time, and you ultimately may not have lost the client, in which case you do not have damages and you will not have a case for tortious interference. There are circumstances in which the damages may be speculative. In other words, if they're not an existing client with a past track history of how much you made with them, or for a certain amount of years, then the likelihood that this person would have stayed with you, and that you would have made X amount based on past behavior, becomes really hard to determine, and so does what your damages amount is.

In addition to that, you have to make sure there are no other market forces or other circumstances that potentially would have caused the interference, or caused the damages to be less, given certain circumstances. For instance, the contract rate might have gone down, or the price of materials might have gone down. There are also intervening factors, such as your ability to actually do the job if you would have gotten it. So it's a very complicated area to figure out damages, but the most important thing is that you have to be able to tie the two together: the actual wrongful behavior with specifically this amount of damage that you've incurred, or irreparable harm, if it is to your reputation or potentially to the community at large, which also may give rise to a defamation case as well.

Most of the time you'll need experts to prove what your damages were in these type of cases. And if you're a startup company that doesn't have much past history, it becomes even harder to prove what your damages are. They become more speculative, and speculative damages, more often than not, are not permitted or not recoverable in law. It also depends on the kind of records that you keep, so that you can prove the type of damages you've incurred, or what you might have gained from this particular client, contract or relationship.

So as you can probably tell, it's very fact-intensive. If you are going through something like this, you need to be very careful to tie the behavior to your actual damages to prove it. Otherwise you may not have a case, or may not have a very strong case, in which case you want to consider litigation costs: whether it makes sense to get an expert, or maybe just talk to the other person, send them a cease and desist letter and say, "Listen, stop the shenanigans right now, or we're going to go into heavier territory," so to speak. More often than not, that is enough to get someone to stop. And if it's not, then you may have no choice but to move ahead, either with an injunction or a potential claim for tortious interference, depending on whether it's a contractual or an economic relationship.

So hopefully this has been helpful. If you need any more information, or would like to run a case by us to see if your case has the strength of merit and has the elements to meet tortious interference, do not hesitate to reach out to us. Thank you so much for everything. Thank you for tuning in. Bye.