It’s probably become obvious over the years to anyone that reads this blog regularly, that I love contracts. It was my favorite class during first year of law school (everyone else preferred torts, with its car crashes and the like) and one of the reasons I have spent decades litigating insurance coverage disputes is they are really just glorified contract disputes with their own specialized associated body of rules. Even my business litigation practice is often very contract based at heart, such as disputes over deals and transactions that have gone south, which at the end of the day rest on contracts at their foundation. My ERISA practice has much the same flavor – although it is heavily dependent upon understanding and being able to weaponize a whole host of related matters, such as the rules governing prohibited transactions or the law of fiduciary liability, at heart all cases start from one of the most complicated contracts known to American lawyers, the ERISA governed plan.

I have always enjoyed – partly as a result – the art of reducing a really complicated settlement to a written agreement. Not the kind where it just says the plaintiff gets paid and releases all defendants and their insurers from anything and everything, but the kind with lots of contingencies, moving parts, parties and carve outs. ERISA is a natural area for this, but so too are some of the multi-party, large dollar coverage exposures that I have resolved.

One of the issues with that type of drafting, however, is that there is always a question of what to leave in and what to leave out (to quote – or possibly misquote – an old Bob Seger song). I have litigated a number of cases over the scope of settlement agreements (always in the context of me litigating agreements written by others), including in both ERISA and insurance disputes, and the question of interpretation of unclear language becomes a little bit like asking about the number of angels on a head of a pin, meaning it’s really open to debate. Sometimes, the court’s approach to addressing that problem is to simply treat the document literally and declare that, if it wasn’t expressly stated in the agreement, then that is the end of the story, no matter what the parties intended. It can often be hard to get courts to go past that initial approach, which can be very frustrating for parties who know that neither they, nor the other side, actually meant the interpretation adopted by the court using that rubric.

So I thought this new decision out of the Massachusetts trial court was terrific, holding that a settlement agreement could be reformed to correct a drafting mistake where the extrinsic evidence was sufficient to demonstrate that a term was only omitted for that reason. The devil, of course, in these scenarios is always in the details, as to whether there is enough evidence to persuade a court that this type of an error occurred, but these types of holdings are few and far enough between to warrant filing this one away for future use in a case.

You can find a Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly article on the decision here, although I suspect it’s behind a paywall.