Damages: Phone company liable for lawyers’ lost business

A telephone book company that screws up a lawyer’s advertisement is liable in damages for the clients he doesn’t get, according to a recent decision by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.

In the case, the firm of Kay & Anderson paid $505 for a an ad in the book, but the phone company failed to put in the ad for one lawyer and mis-alphabetized another. The lawyers sued, showing that business was down for the year and calculating that they had lost $152,000. The court agreed, finding that the lawyers’ own calculations were sufficient to show the loss.

An interesting sidebar to the decision was the fact that the phone company ordinarily precludes such claims by including boilerplate in its agreements limiting remedies to a refund of the ad price. Here, however, the phone company was unable to produce the original copy of the law firm’s contract. A copy of the front side of the two-page agreement form was admitted, but the court held that the phone company did not prove that this particular form actually had the boilerplate printed on the back.

Kay & Andersen, S.C. v. Ameritech Publ., Inc., 2005 Wisc. App. LEXIS 216 (Dist. 4, March 10, 2005)