Indianapolis Litigation

Your friendly Indianapolis litigation associate at Alerding Castor Hewitt LLP here with another blog post.  About a month ago, in an aspirational piece, I piggybacked off of a post by Michael P. Alerding at Alerding & Co. on the importance of words and how they should mean something.  You can read my prior post here and the one by ACH’s Dave Castor re-posting Mr. Alderding’s original post here. 

Today’s post is to tell you about a recent victory that one of our SaaS law clients achieved in a contract interpretation matter.  The dispute centered on a provision in the client’s services agreement that contained exculpatory language and language limiting the amount of potential damages.  Our SaaS law client raised the provision in defense to the defendant’s counterclaims.  The Court, taking a very practical approach, addressed the plain language of the provision and the intent behind such provisions in contracts. The Court upheld the provision because it concluded that the defendant’s counter-interpretation would not provide the certainty or security that such provisions are designed to do in the first place by limiting liability to certain claims and placing a cap on the amount of potential damages recoverable.  As such, the Court enforced the contract as written, including the limitation of liabilities provision, which may effectively remove much of the counterclaim’s teeth in the suit.

One of the interesting things about the ruling is that it reinforces the notion that words in documents can and do mean what they say.  It is refreshing to see our courts uphold written agreements and enforce an agreement’s provisions, thereby holding the parties to the bargain that they struck when they initially entered into their agreement.  I am hopeful that this practice will continue, and I am sure I will be particularly pleased when it benefits our Saas law and other business law clients.