This office is celebrating our first appellate victory!! We were recently successful in convincing the Fifth District Court of Appeal that commission merchants, who market produce received from growers, owe a fiduciary duty to the growers, whose produce they buy and sell. (See
unanimous opinion, penned by Justice Dawson.)
This victory is significant for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it means that the commission merchants who we allege have conspired and collaborated with grower's agents, and even some large markets to defraud growers will now be held accountable for their unlawful and dishonest acts. Their fraudulent conduct and conversion of my client's produce, as well as that of other farmers, for their own profit costs farmers millions of dollars a year in lost profits. It is those profits that we are seeking to recover in Mendoza v. Rast, et al and Mendoza v. Sunny Cal, et al.
You may be wondering why an estate planning attorney is pursuing lawsuits that are out of her advertised area of practice and expertise. Well, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a powerful civil and civil rights litigator. I got burned out on all the unattractive things about litigation; you know, all the distasteful episodes that good lawyer jokes are made of: the positively odious behavior of the lawyers involved, including sometimes not just the opposing counsel, but the conduct of my co-counsel as well; the lack of competent bench officers; clients whose expectations exceeded what was realistically possible; and the fact that, for the most part, it really is all about money. Justice is just an occasional by-product of our legal system, I came to believe. (For more on this aspect of the story, please see article entitled, "How Did I Get Here"?)
Perhaps in the life of every attorney, there is one case, one client, one story, that really calls to us; the one we cannot walk away from and maintain peace of mind; the one that really gets under our skin. For me, this is that story, and Jose Mendoza is that client.
For this is a story unlike any other. This is the story of the wholesale rip-off of the American Dream.
Jose and his brother Jerry, who work the ranch side by side, immigrated to this country with their families when they were children. They worked as farm laborers and worked the very land that they now lease and hope to someday purchase. They work very hard and are good farmers, harvesting wonderful and delicious crops, including pomegranates, granny smith apples and olives among others. But somehow, in spite of the fact that the San Joaquin Valley boasts of some of the most fertile growing soil in the world, they were not seeing the return that they expected.
Further investigation and consultation with other growers and experts in the field, convinced them that something was amiss here. So they requested a full and complete accounting for their produce from the grower's agent, in this case Rast Produce Co., Inc., (hereinafter "Rast") as they are entitled to do pursuant to the California Food and Agriculture Code. In reviewing what documents Rast provided, it was discovered that Rast and the commission merchants hired by Rast to market the produce, to wit, pomegranates, had breached numerous statutory, common law and fiduciary duties that were owed to Mendoza regarding the handling of his produce.
You see, agents acting on behalf of another owe a fiduciary duty to the principle, in this case, Mendoza. Fiduciary duties are beyond ordinary duties owed in contractual, or other relationships, because the agent or agents are in exclusive control of not only the produce itself, but of all of the documentation and records that must be accurately kept in order to fully and accurately account to the principle as required by law. In other words, they have all the cards in the deck. That means that the growers are at the mercy of the commission merchants to honestly account to them, which, sadly, they did not do.
Because commission merchants have such control over the fruits of another's labor, lawmakers, both state and federal, have long understood the need to legally hold these merchants accountable. There is a great deal of case law stating just that, including Fischer v. Machado. In her opinion, Justice Dawson, expanded the Fischer doctrine to include not only the grower's agent, i.e., Rast, but also the commission merchants as "sub-agents." Because we are alleging that these parties routinely conspire and collaborate together to steal from the farmers, we are now able to hold them all accountable.
We aren't nearly done yet, however. This ruling basically gives us a new beginning. We will be in court in August to determine what happens next as we prepare for trial, most likely next year. We will keep you posted!
For any questions regarding this, or any other happenings in our office, please feel free to contact me or Mercene, by phone or email.
