The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University v. Agilent…

Background

The court considered two motions: a motion to reconsider its July 17, 2020 order and a motion seeking a determination that a settlement was made in good faith. The reconsideration motion concerned the court’s earlier summary-judgment rulings on affirmative defenses. Summary judgment is a ruling without a trial when the relevant facts do not require a jury to decide the issue.

Reconsideration ruling

The court granted the motion for reconsideration in part and denied it in part. It found clear error in granting summary judgment on Agilent’s affirmative defenses when Stanford had moved for summary judgment only on HP’s affirmative defenses. The court reinstated Agilent’s seventeenth defense, waiver and estoppel; eighteenth defense, assumption of risk; and thirty-fourth defense, release or waiver.

The court cautioned that reinstatement did not guarantee that the jury would receive an instruction on any defense. An instruction would not be given if a defense was inapplicable or unsupported by evidence.

The court denied reconsideration of its ruling on HP’s assumption-of-risk defense, but clarified that ruling’s scope. The court stated that its decision to grant summary judgment was correct as to any contractual or primary assumption-of-risk defense. Secondary assumption of risk, however, is a form of comparative negligence rather than a separate affirmative defense. Therefore, HP may present evidence that Stanford knew about the contamination and allowed it to happen as part of HP’s comparative-negligence defense.

The court also stated that HP may argue that Stanford’s damages should be offset by the $7 million discount Stanford allegedly received when it purchased the ground lease, to account for the contamination. But Stanford’s decision to buy back the lease early, standing alone, is not secondary assumption of risk or comparative negligence because Stanford already owned the contaminated land and the buyback did not expose it to any additional risk.

Good-faith settlement motion and disposition

For reasons discussed at the hearing, the court stated that it would rule on the motion for a determination of good-faith settlement during or immediately after trial. The order therefore granted the reconsideration motion in part, denied it in part, and deferred ruling on the good-faith settlement motion. Judge Vince Chhabria signed the order.