Logo Rondot Eychène Fréminville
Expertise

Commercial litigation

OVERVIEW

The firm assists its clients in every type of civil or commercial litigation they encounter, whether it is with their suppliers, their distributors, their competitors, or their clients.

More specifically, the firm handles disputes relating to the wrongful termination of negotiations, the non-performance or faulty execution of contracts, the brutal termination of established commercial relationships, the existence of significant contractual imbalances and acts of unfair competition.

The firm always gives priority to amicable resolution of the disputes referred to it and, in the absence of any useful alternative, defends its clients before the civil, commercial and arbitration courts using the most appropriate procedure (application, summary proceedings, short period, merits).

Before any trial and depending on the case, the firm may have to initiate expert appraisals, civil searches under article 145 of the French Code of Civil Procedure and seizures of assets as a precautionary measure.

In each of its cases, the firm works with partners who have solid expertise in business litigation (bailiffs, IT experts, experts in damage assessment, barristers, etc.).

RANKINGS AND DISTINCTIONS

The firm’s lawyers all have extensive experience of proceedings before arbitral and judicial tribunals.

They have won several awards for their dispute resolution skills:

Nos interventions

Anticompetitive practices

A software company accused one of its former employees and shareholders of having set up a competitor company that would engage in anti-competitive behaviour against it (poaching, parasitism, denigration, disorganisation and counterfeiting of its software).

The company did not have sufficient evidence to definitively characterize the anti-competitive acts in legal proceedings.

Faced with this situation, our team carried out a civil search of the competitor’s premises, on the basis of article 145 of the French Code of Civil Procedure, in order to seize written documents and computer files that would make it possible to establish that the alleged acts had been committed and to initiate proceedings before the competent courts.

On the basis of this evidence, the firm then brought an action on the merits against the competitor company before the relevant Commercial Court to require it to :

– immediately cease all anti-competitive practices against our client under penalty of payment of a certain sum of money for each day of delay;

– compensate our client for the material damage resulting from the loss of customers and market share;

– compensate our client for non-material damage.

The firm also held the founder of the competitor personally liable for breaches of his non-compete clause.

In order to characterize the financial damages suffered by its client, the firm called in a financial consultant firm who carried out a study of the market in which the type of software operated by the two competing companies was sold.

Abrupt termination of an established commercial relationship

A major brand in the industrial tools sector terminated its contractual relationship with our client, a major group specializing in communications and marketing, without any notice period, even though the two business partners had been doing business for almost 6 years.

Given the abrupt nature of this termination, our client did not have the time it needed to reorganize its business, given that it was incurring a number of expenses to perform its contractual obligations under the best possible conditions (26 employees and around ten leased cars).

After unsuccessful attempts to reach an amicable agreement, the firm brought the dispute before the competent commercial court to seek compensation for the various losses suffered by its client as a result of the sudden termination of the established commercial relations.

In order to obtain compensation for the loss incurred, the firm claimed that :

  • in any case, the co-contractor should be ordered to reimburse our client for the sums it had incurred in dismissing and reclassifying the employees assigned to it and terminating the leasing contracts for the vehicles dedicated to its mission.
  • as a subsidiary claim, termination was effected without notice, whereas our customer should normally have been given at least 8 months’ notice in accordance with article L. 442-1 of the French Commercial Code, given the length of the contractual relationship;
  • as a principal claim, the co-contractor had failed to comply with the conditions for termination set out in the contract, which was concluded for a fixed term; as a result, the contract should normally have produced its effects until its term;

In order to quantify our client’s loss of earnings caused by the wrongful termination of this contract, the firm set out in detailed figures the amount of the gross margin on variable costs achieved by its client each month with its co-contractor, in accordance with legal and jurisprudential criteria.

Contractual disputes - Supply of goods

Our client, a manufacturing company of construction materials, had delivered a number of parts to a project manager as part of a construction project carried out on behalf of a major rail transport company.

During the course of the contract, the project manager realized that the parts delivered did not meet the safety standards its project had to meet. Faced with this situation, the project manager refused to pay the amount of the order, which amounted to several million euros, even though it had never been stipulated between the parties that the parts had to meet the aforementioned safety standard.

The firm brought two actions before the courts (one in summary proceedings and one on the merits) against the project manager in order to obtain payment of the order price as soon as possible, payment of interest for late payment and payment of damages in respect of orders that should normally have been placed in the near future.

Contractual disputes – Service delivery

Our team also acted on behalf of a client, an IT software publisher who had developed a platform dedicated to NFT commercial transactions. The latter had entered into a business relationship with a consultancy firm in order to be assisted with the legal, strategic and financial structuring of its project.

Several of the consultancy firm’s recommendations turned out to be false and illegal, causing our client significant damages.

The firm brought an action on the merits seeking an order against the consultancy firm to:

  • pay damages and interest in respect of the material and non-material damages it had caused to our client;
  •  reimburse the sums paid in return for its services.

Drop shipping

Our client, a ready-to-wear clothing company, was accused of dropshipping practices by a number of Internet users on an online review platform.

The immediate effect of these accusations was to block the company’s international development, as no foreign distributor was now willing to work with the company to resell its products.

The platform refused to remove these reviews, which were damaging because they were accessible to the public, even though our client produced all the evidence to show that he had his own suppliers (who made his clothes according to precise and detailed specifications) and that he was therefore in no way engaging in the dropshipping practices of which he was wrongly accused (presumably by ill-intentioned competitors).

The firm brought an interim action against the platform before the president of the commercial court, seeking an order for the immediate removal of the notices and the payment of a sum of money for each day’s delay, as well as for any notices subsequently published.