UNDERSTANDING COMMON LAW INDEMNITY

SHOWERDOOR4Common law indemnification is a “common” third party claim in multi-party litigation, particularly construction defect litigation. For instance, if a general contractor is sued by an owner for defects, the contractor may third party in the applicable subcontractors and assert a common law indemnification theory against the subcontractors to flow through liability. However, common law indemnity does not have to be asserted as a third party claim, but can be asserted as an affirmative claim after a judgment is entered against a party.

 

For example, in Diplomat Resorts Limited Partnership v. Tecnoglass, LLC, 38 Fla. L. Weekly D1126a (Fla. 4th DCA 2013), a hotel owner hired a contractor to furnish and install glass shower doors in hotel rooms. The subcontractor, naturally, purchased the glass doors from a fabricator / manufacturer and then installed the doors at the hotel. Unfortunately, many of the glass shower doors spontaneously fractured. The hotel owner obtained a judgment against the contractor in arbitration for the damages it incurred in replacing the doors. However, because the contractor was likely not collectible, the hotel owner took an assignment of the contractor’s claims against the fabricator / manufacturer because the thought was the glass fractured due to a defect in the fabrication process.

 

The hotel owner, standing in the shoes of its contractor through the assignment, sued the fabricator / manufacturer and asserted a common law indemnification claim which was dismissed with prejudice by the trial court. On appeal, the Fourth District reversed finding that the hotel owner (standing in the shoes as the contractor) properly asserted the following elements of common law indemnification: 1) that the contractor is wholly without fault, 2) the fabricator / manufacturer is at fault, and 3) the fabricator / manufacturer is liable to the contractor because the contractor was vicariously, constructively, derivatively, or technically liable to the hotel owner for the wrongful acts of the fabricator / manufacturer.

 

One of the challenges with common law indemnification is that there are court decisions that require the party seeking indemnification to be in a “special relationship” with the party it is seeking indemnification from. The Fourth District, however, maintained that a party does not need to specifically plead the existence of a special relationship because this “merely describes a relationship which makes a faultless party ‘only vicariously, constructively, derivatively, or technically liable for the wrongful acts” of the party at fault.”  Diplomat Resorts Limited Partnership.

 

Although the Fourth District’s decision in Diplomat Resorts appears to make a common law indemnification claim easier to prevail on a motion to dismiss, it is still a challenging claim to prove because it requires the party seeking indemnity to be wholly without fault. In other words, if that party is slightly at fault, there is no common law indemnity. Putting this in context, if the contractor is slightly at fault regarding installing the shower doors, it will not prevail on its common law indemnification claim.

 

In fact, the fabricator / installer in Diplomat Resorts argued that the contractor failed to properly install the glass doors for this very reason; however, there was no finding by the arbitrator that the contractor improperly installed the glass doors. Had there been a specific finding, there likely would be no common law indemnification claim because “a former adjudication against an indemnitee [e.g., contractor], finding the indemnitee’s acts to be wrongful, is binding against the indemnitee and precludes indemnification.” Diplomat Resorts Limited Partnership.

 

Notably, there are times in arbitration or litigation where parties do not want specific findings of fact. One of those is in a situation where a defendant may look to another for a common law indemnification claim (such as against a manufacturer) because that party does not want a finding that it did anything wrong that would be contradictory to its position that its liability flows 100% from the party it is pursuing the common law indemnification claim against.

 

Please contact David Adelstein at dadelstein@gmail.com or (954) 361-4720 if you have questions or would like more information regarding this article. You can follow David Adelstein on Twitter @DavidAdelstein1.

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