Earlier this month, Minnesota Litigator highlighted the all-too-common experience of parties having problems by blowing past the “i-dotting/t-crossing” minutiae critical to fully and finally concluding litigation.
For obvious reasons, the other extreme is less common — that is, wanting to keep the battle raging after a truce has been reached — but such scenarios are by no means rare. In fact, U.S. District Court Judge Donovan Frank (D. Minn.) has just decided such a case.
“I never signed the settlement agreement” seems so alluring to non-lawyers and/or inexperienced litigators. Lay people have a pretty good excuse but litigators who make the mistake of thinking that a signature create a contract, previously non-existent, might want to brush up on their contract law.
Rosenbloom involved an employment discrimination case where the client thought he could walk away from a binding settlement agreement because he never signed it. Defendant GNC does not appear to have wasted much time getting the Court’s ruling to the contrary.