Standard Contract Advice, Of Course: Be Careful What You Agree To

Why? Because a court is probably going to hold you to it. 

This case, Frick Joint Venture v. Village Super Market, Inc., Docket No. A-1441-15T1, out of New Jersey, is a complicated case with a lot of history between the parties which no doubt colors the court’s decision but it’s also a case that just makes logical sense.  

Village Super Market was the anchor tenant of Frick Joint Venture’s shopping center. By the terms of the lease, Village had the right to approve certain changes to the shopping center. One of the changes involved a gas station that had gone out of business. Frick desired to set up a Starbucks in the footprint that had been occupied by the gas station; Village refused to provide its consent. 

The parties went back and forth trying to resolve the issue, but eventually Frick requested AAA arbitration pursuant to the lease agreement. Through respective counsel, Village responded requesting the choosing of a private arbitrator instead, to avoid AAA fees. The parties agreed on a succession of private arbitrators, and, eventually, to a mediator instead, over the course of several months. However, Village never provided Frick with any dates for the arbitration (later mediation), despite repeated requests on Frick’s part to get the thing scheduled. Eventually, ten months after first discussing arbitration with Village, Frick contacted AAA to demand arbitration. AAA contacted Village to set dates, and at that point Village contended that it was not required to go to arbitration under the terms of the lease and thus rejected the arbitration demand. 

The court thought that the relevant portion of the contract was “not a model of clarity” but was also comfortable in making its decision regardless of what the lease agreement required, because there had been multiple communications over the course of many months in which Village agreed to arbitration. Therefore, the lease agreement’s terms was unimportant in the fact of this ongoing agreement by Village. Even if these communications didn’t rise to the level of a contract, Village was estopped from arguing otherwise because Frick had relied on Village’s representations about arbitration to its detriment: During the delay in making the arbitration demand, the gas station portion of the shopping center continued to sit vacant. 

The court finally concluded that Village’s behavior from the very beginning appeared to indicate that it understood the matter should be arbitrated, and so Frick was permitted to demand arbitration.