Equity First

Rincon EV Realty LLC v. CP II Rincon Towers, Inc., No. A138463 (D1d4 Jan. 31, 2017)

So I kinda called this one three years ago.

This is a real estate dispute with both equitable and legal claims. In a prior appeal, the Court of Appeal held that the trial court shouldn’t have enforced a jury trial waiver as to the legal claims. But it left standing a defense judgment on the key equitable claim—a UCL claim that bootstrapped all of the allegations from the legal claims. 

So on remand, defendants moved for summary judgment, arguing that the court’s factual findings on the UCL claim were binding as to the legal claims, and thus that, jury right be damned, the legal claims failed as a matter of law. The trial court granted the motion and the Court of Appeal here affirms. 

Plaintiff tries to argue a bunch of different ways what that shouldn’t be the case, but all to no avail. The Court of Appeal’s prior decision wasn’t an unqualified reversal, so Plaintiff had no right to retry the facts found in the UCL claim. And since those facts did, in fact, doom the legal claims, summary judgment was proper.

Affirmed.

Nedlloyd Eats Jury Trial Waiver

Rincon Realty LLC v. CP II Rincon Towers, Inc., No. A138463 (Jan. 31, 2017)

In a very large real estate deal involving a luxury building in SF’s rapidly developing Rincon Hill ’hood, the contract picks New York law as broadly as a contract can express an intent to do that. It also contains a jury trial waiver. It does, not, however, lay a mandatory venue in NY. (Or at least the parties never argued it did.) And that is a fatal fact.