Published Legal Authority Concerning a Favorite Vendor as Named Defendant

Rather than me telling you what the case is all about, how about if I reprint the "core terms" used for searching purposes on Lexis, and hopefully a few of you will take a shot and guess what the subject and holding of the case is.

NAME OF THE CASE: Industrial Gen. Corp. v. Sequoia Pac. Sys. Corp., 44 F.3d 40 (1st Cir. 1995)


fiduciary, machine, prototype, voting, fiduciary relationship existed, breach of contract, fiduciary relationship, dependence, disparity, unfair, work-in-progress, manufacturer, settlement, turn-key, shipped, fiduciary duty, unyielding, transform, unfairly, commerce, plastic, indicia, owed, mistaken, supplier, finances, alerted, abused, buyer, molds


Looking it up with the cite or googling it is smart, but is also against the rules! tsk, tsk.

Word collages. Do we have any contestants?

The company that makes the machines is suing because Suckuoia refused to pay for machines because of some other legal ruling on voting will warrant a change from the original model? Industrial Gen. is saying it's a breach of contract because their contract stipulated that since it was a work in progress there was the possibility that such an event might occur and so now want payment per their contract?

Don't make fun of me...my specialty is not anywhere near this field.:-)

that's the clue

I'd never seen your spelling of Suckuoia before. Is that like the more indigenous native american spelling or something? : )

so, now that we know that that the supplier is designing and making molds for the production of voting machines, we can eliminate a few of the clue words:

CONTINUING WORDS:
fiduciary, voting, fiduciary relationship existed, breach of contract, fiduciary relationship, dependence, disparity, unfair, settlement, fiduciary duty, unyielding, unfairly, indicia, owed, mistaken, alerted, abused, buyer,


ELIMINATED WORDS"
machine, prototype, turn-key, shipped, work-in-progress, manufacturer, transform, commerce, supplier, finances, plastic, molds

Oy! I'm SUCH an idiot! :-)

Lemme try.

I'm going to guess that molds were delivered, but not to the satisfaction of Sequoia, who balked at paying because the decal didn't look right (maybe Sequoia got spelled incorrectly). Meanwhile the supplier had warned Sequoia that the mold might not look quite right, but Sequoia didn't do anything until after the bill was due

So the plastic guy comes back to Sequoia to reach a settlement but Sequoia is not playing nicely.

:shrug:

"Dirty thieving bastards for 200, Land Shark!"

"What is Diebold?"

1995- IIRC this is prior to the introduction of the Edge DRE. SO if we are talking DREs, its the Advantage DRE, which was introduced in 1986-87. The Advantage DRE has a large plastic case.

If Sequoia had their machines built for them under a turn-key agreement, do they even know if the machines are up to snuff? Suppose there's a Moog synthesizer stuck in there somewhere and the things start playing "Deutschland Uber Allis" in the middle of an election? Or worse, start switching votes around or something?

...bust the damn thing right off.

http://eri.ca/refer/deutschl.MP3

1. Germany, Germany above all *
Above everything in the world *
When, always, for protection and defense
Brothers stand together.
From the Maas to the Memel
From the Etsch to the Belt,
Germany, Germany above all
Above all in the world.

2. German women, German fidelity,
German wine and German song,
Shall retain, throughout the world,
Their old respected fame,
To inspire us to noble deeds
For the length of our lives.
German women, German fidelity,
German wine and German song.

3. Unity and right and freedom
For the German Fatherland;
Let us all strive to this goal
Brotherly, with heart and hand.
Unity and rights and freedom
Are the pledge of fortune grand.
Prosper in this fortune's glory,
Prosper German fatherland

you get beer, pretzels and schnitzel.

Free armbands for every 100th voter.

A rough synopsis of the case holding:

The trial court, after a hearing/trial, bascially found that sequoia acted in bad faith in dealing with its own supplier.

The supplier to Sequoia argued it was induced to trust and confidence in sequoia, arguing that this created a fiduciary duty on the part of Sequoia to be honest and forthright with the supplier because the supplier had confided a lot in Sequoia as part of a possible buyout proposal of the supplier by Sequoia. After a trial, the jury and the judge agreed, and it was held that Sequoia had acted "unfairly" to the supplier by, for example, never informing the supplier of the fact that Sequoia knew that the party the supplier was directly working with (a third party responsible to assemble the voting machines overall) was about to go out of business due to lack of money to pay suppliers). As a result, products already shipped to the third party benefited Sequoia, but Sequoia never actually paid the supplier even though it had helped set up the relationship with the third party assembler and was argued to have known what was going on at all material times.

Despite the jury's specific finding that Sequoia acted unfairly, the apppellate court reversed, finding that as a matter of law contracting parties did not create a (more special level of legal duty called fiduciary duty in the context of the execution of a private contract between two private parties.

(i.e. in other words, even though the appellate court did not rule at all that Sequioa WAS fair, the appellate court was not willing to make or allow a general rule that fiduciary duty applied in these types of "business" contexts, and so as a matter of law the trust and confidence that the trial proved the supplier had in Sequoia could not establish a level of duty higher than the basic duties owed by all businesspeople to avoid major outright lying, etc.)

So, the case helps set Massachusetts law regarding unfair business practices and the duties of business parties with regard to their closer suppliers. The court did not wish to (in effect) give Sequoia an affirmative duty to give its supplier a heads up, even though Sequoia had a closer than normal business relationship with the supplier, the supplier having opened up all of its books and records and had a "business heart to heart" about being bought out by Sequoia, presumably with the benefit of a standard confidentiality agreement, signed by Sequoia.