The first case I tried as a first chair was a Chapter 93A case.

The first big money – north of $20 million – case I ever tried as a first chair was a Chapter 93A case.

The most recent case I tried included a Chapter 93A claim.

In between and mixed among them, I have tried patent infringement, contract, pierce the corporate veil, reinsurance, product liability, construction accident, reinsurance and a number of other types of cases.

But there was always a difficulty in drafting proposed conclusions of law at the close of the case that was unique to the Chapter 93A cases and absent from the others. This was due to the fact that many principles of Chapter 93A liability that are generally accepted by courts and Massachusetts lawyers cannot be cited to a particular leading decision. Instead, they often must be supported by analogy or inference, rather than by directly citing to a controlling decision on the issue.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court’s recent decision in Agnitti v. Philip Morris resolves this problem for at least three principles of Chapter 93A law in Massachusetts.

First, it offers a handy cite to a principle that is clearly the law, which is that all of the underlying common law or statutory causes of action, such as in Agnitti for product liability, can fail and you can still recover for violation of Chapter 93A. The case makes for an easy cite on the proposition that a Chapter 93A claim stands on its own and can allow recovery based solely on its violation, regardless of any other cause of action pled in the action or the outcome of such causes of action. Not exactly a novel principle of law, but certainly one that the case makes easy to establish from here on out – which was not necessarily the case before the decision, as evidenced by the erroneous jury instruction given on this point at the trial.

Second, not too long ago, I was defending a Chapter 93A case premised on alleged misrepresentations. Establishing the exact elements necessary for the plaintiff to actually recover under Chapter 93A in that circumstance required stringing together a series of different cites. The Court’s ruling in Agnitti states quite definitively what has to be proven to prevail on such a case.

And finally in this regard, the Court buried in the footnotes a direct and clear statement of causation in the context of a Chapter 93A claim based on misrepresentations, explaining the exact nature of the causal relationship needed to recover. That quote alone will save a lawyer a half page of cites and explanation when discussing causation in Chapter 93A actions in the future.