SPRINGFIELD – Senior U.S. District Judge Phil Gilbert of Benton correctly applied Illinois law to figure one defendant’s contribution to another in a settlement dispute, Supreme Court Justices ruled on June 17.
Gilbert found Safety International of St. Louis must contribute $190,000 to trucker Alexandre Solomakha, rather than $760,000 as Solomakha argued.
Appellate judges of the U.S. Seventh Circuit placed the Justices in the peculiar position of reviewing Gilbert last year.
Five Justices found he got it right and two claimed the majority got it so wrong that the legislature would need to revisit the Illinois Contribution Act.
The case before the Supreme Court concerned a crash in a construction zone on Interstate 70 in Madison County in 2013.
State police ticketed Alexandre Solomakha for driving his Freightliner truck too fast for conditions.
The other driver Thomas Roberts of Missouri sued Solomakha and his Alexandria Transportation business in 2014.
In 2015, Solomakha filed third party claims against project contractor Edwards-Kamadulski of East St. Louis and a St. Louis consultant, Safety International.
In 2017, Roberts and Edwards-Kamadulski settled for $50,000.
Solomakha alleged bad faith, claiming the amount didn’t reflect Edwards-Kamadulski’s relative fault.
Gilbert dismissed Edwards-Kamadulski with prejudice, finding a small settlement does not necessarily indicate bad faith.
He found the amount must be viewed in relation to probability of recovery, defenses raised, and potential liability.
Later that year, Roberts released claims against Solomakha and Safety International in return for a $1,850,000 payment from Solomakha.
That meant Solomakha could seek contribution from Safety International.
Gilbert canceled trial for Roberts and set a liability trial for Solomakha and Safety International in 2019.
He ruled that he would submit to jurors a verdict form assessing liability not only for Solomakha and Safety International but also for Edwards-Kamadulski.
Edwards-Kamadulski’s managing member Kevin Edwards, a man with nothing to lose, testified like one at trial.
His initial answers to Solomakha’s counsel Lori Vanderlaan of Chicago averaged three words and included “if you say so” and “I’m not aware of that.”
Vanderlaan asked two questions about an accident report and twice he said he wasn’t sure.
She persisted and he said, “I’m very seldom on site,” and “I’m not familiar with what the guys turn in every day.”
She showed him a traffic control surveillance document and she said, “It has your signature, Kevin Edwards, right?”
“That’s my name,” Edwards said. “That’s not my signature.”
She asked if somebody forged it and he said, “I may have forwarded it to the superintendent and he put it on the form.”
She asked if he was aware Mike Sicking of Safety International made only two visits to the job, and he said, “We had more than one job going.”
She said, “He couldn’t have done any of those services that he promised to do relative to safety management that we just went through. Is that true?”
He said, “I might have had ten jobs going on at this time.” He said he didn’t know who operated the slow and stop sign.
She asked if his company was asked to identify other persons on the site who had knowledge of the accident and events leading up to it.
He said, “I don’t know what the question was about.”
She said, “As you sit here today you don’t know of any of your employees who had knowledge of this accident, correct?”
He said, “No I don’t. It didn’t happen on the job site. The job site was like five miles long. Where we were currently working at I don’t know.”
She asked Edwards if they saw each other in the hall earlier and he said yes.
She said, “You were upset this morning that you would have to come back this afternoon, weren’t you?”
He said, “No I wasn’t upset.”
She said, “Didn’t you in fact tell me that I don’t want to call you in this case because you will try to destroy my case? Didn’t you make that statement, sir?”
He said, “No I didn’t.”
Jurors assigned 75 percent of fault to Edwards-Kamadulski, 15 percent to Solomakha, and 10 percent to Safety International.
Gilbert ordered Safety International to contribute $190,000, ten percent of the settlement fund, to Solomakha.
Neither side liked the result.
Solomakha’s counsel Christina Tribbia of Chicago moved to alter judgment by declaring Edwards-Kamadulski’s share uncollectable.
Under the Contribution Act, that would compensate for Edwards-Kamadulski’s absence by multiplying liability of the others by four.
Tribbia claimed Gilbert in essence punished Solomakha for settling and rewarded Safety International for forcing the case to trial.
Safety International counsel Brandon Copeland of St. Louis moved for judgment against the verdict as a matter of law.
He claimed there was no evidence Safety International had a duty to Roberts.
He claimed representatives of Safety International and Edwards-Kamadulski testified that their contract placed no duty on Safety International.
Gilbert found jurors believed otherwise, and he must have believed otherwise too.
In an order denying judgment as a matter of law, he included the text of Edwards denying any conversation in the hall.
“The jury in this case was the ultimate finder of fact, and it was entitled to give the testimony in this case whatever weight it deserved,” Gilbert wrote.
“This court does not have the legal authority to second guess that.”
He denied Solomakha’s motion to alter judgment, finding no new law or evidence that would lead him to change his ruling.
Again, neither side liked the result.
Solomakha petitioned the Seventh Circuit appellate court in Chicago for $760,000, and Safety International petitioned for zero.
Seventh Circuit judges denied zero judgment last August, but they found no Illinois court decision to guide them on the meaning of uncollectable.
They certified the question to the Justices in Springfield.
Safety International argued there that Edwards-Kamadulski’s obligation wasn’t uncollectable but was collected.
Justice Scott Neville adopted that view on behalf of a majority.
“This court has consistently viewed the statutory references to collectability as referring to insolvency or immunity,” Neville wrote.
“The Act promotes settlement by providing that a tortfeasor who enters into a good faith settlement with the plaintiff is discharged from any contribution liability to a nonsettling tortfeasor.”
He wrote that the award of $190,000 vindicated the Contribution Act’s public policy of equitably apportioning damages.
He wrote that Solomakha chose to settle for $1,850,000, and Safety had no input on the amount.
Chief Justice Anne Burke and Justices Rita Garman, Mary Jane Theis, and David Overstreet concurred.
Dissenter Robert Carter found the majority appeared to hold that the obligation of a settling tortfeasor is collectable.
He wrote that he couldn’t reconcile the holding with the legislature’s decision to provide absolute immunity to settling parties.
He wrote that the majority’s decision had the potential to undermine the Act’s goal of encouraging settlements.
He rejected any distinction between immunity for settlements under the Contribution Act and other kinds of immunity.
He wrote that evaluating fairness on contribution liability is an inherently subjective endeavor in a complicated case.
He wrote that Safety International chose not to settle and assumed a risk.
Justice Michael Burke joined him.