I want to thank my partner, Sean Brennecke, for his valuable contribution to this post.

The titular holding was rendered in the context of whether substantial compliance was established as a defense to a breach of contract claim in a recent decision of the Delaware Court of Chancery in the matter styled LPPAS Representative, LLC v. ATH Holding Company, LLC, et al., C.A. No. 2022-0241-KSJM (Del. Ch., May 2, 2023).

This useful decision deserves a spot in the toolbox of all commercial litigators. It addresses several noteworthy issues beyond substantial compliance, including whether the right to participate by the indemnitee as part of a right to indemnification was honored–but for purposes of this short post I will limit my highlights to only a few aspects of the decision.

The court’s discussion begins with its holding that the defendant breached the terms of the contract it entered into with plaintiff by, among other things, not including the plaintiff in discussions with a government agency, not allowing plaintiff to review and comment on filings and submissions the defendant made to a court or government agency, and otherwise failed to allow plaintiff to participate in the defense of claims for which the defendants were providing indemnification. 

In so holding, the court rejected the defendants’ arguments, including that they substantially complied with the contract’s requirements. The court discusses the substantial compliance issue primarily from pages 34 to 39 of the slip opinion.  Initially, the court observed that the parties disagreed on whether Delaware law required a party to strictly comply with the terms of a contract or whether substantial compliance was sufficient. In footnote 163 the court reviewed the cases cited by the parties on this issue although the court did not view the parties as having “meaningfully” briefed the question and noted that the limited authority cited by the parties did not fully support their respective positions.

In order to “streamline this decision,” the court assumed that the applicable standard is substantial compliance as that is the lower standard. 

Applying that assumption, the court considered whether the defendants’ failure was “material.”  The court instructed that Delaware followed the Restatement (Second) of Contracts for determining materiality in the substantial compliance context and identified five circumstances which are particularly significant, including “the extent to which the injured party will be deprived of the benefit which he reasonably expected, and the extent to which the injured party can be adequately compensated for the part of the benefit of which he will be deprived….”  See Slip Op. at 35-36.  The court added that the materiality standard is “necessarily imprecise and flexible” and must be “applied in the light of the facts of each case in such a way as to further the purpose for securing for each party his expectations of an exchange of performance.”

The court reasoned that the plaintiff was deprived of the benefit which it reasonably expected, which in this case was the ability to participate in the defense in connection with its right to indemnification and that because that benefit was intangible, “it is hard to imagine how to adequately compensate” for the breach.  Under the circumstances of this case, the court found those factors to weigh in favor of a finding of materiality.

The defendant raised, and the court rejected, five arguments in support of their claim that their breach was immaterial.  One such argument was that their obligations to include plaintiff in critical discussions was not triggered because the plaintiff did not approach the defendant and request that they enter into joint defense agreement.  In rejecting this argument, the court held that the language of the indemnification provision did not impose an affirmative duty to contact the other party to put a joint defense agreement in place. 

The court further observed that the lack of such language in the agreement suggested that “neither party alone bears the burden of first contact.”  Slip Op. at 39.

Therefore, the court concluded that the failure to propose a joint defense agreement proactively did not necessarily absolve the defendants of their own obligation to work with the plaintiff to get one in place or honor their other contractual obligations.