Don’t Come to Court With Unclean Hands

When you sue somebody on a business related matter, you usually want to pinpoint the other side’s wrongful behavior–that they breached a contract or stole information or broke a partnership–whatever it is you’re suing them for. What you might not expect, is your own behavior being scrutinized.

What is Unclean Hands?

The law allows someone being sued, to claim that you, the party suing, have some blame, or some wrongdoing, that lead to the events that you’re suing for. That’s called unclean hands.

It generally means that if you’re suing someone, you can’t have done anything, to cause your own losses, or to cause the other side to breach the contract or to have done what you’re saying that they did.

Imagine, for example, that you hire a builder to build a building. But to save money, you agree with the builder to use cheaper materials that are not up to current building codes. Later, the construction is faulty or substandard, and you, the homeowner, sues. The builder could claim, as a defense, unclean hands–you after all, are the one that told the builder to use the substandard materials in the first place.

The same might apply for someone who lies to you to get you to sign a contract, and then sues you if you breach that contract. You can claim, as a defense to the breach of contract, that the other side defrauded you and thus, comes to court with unclean hands.

Relation to the Lawsuit

As you can see by these examples, the “wrongs” that the party suing committed that gives them the unclean hands, must have some relation to the lawsuit itself.

You also cannot just generally allege that the party suing is a bad person or did some unrelated wrongs. The party sued, asserting the defense, must be able to detail the exact things that they feel that the party suing did, which gives them unclean hands.

In addition, the party using the defense must show that they relied on the other party’s wrongdoing.

In our examples above, the builder relied on the homeowner’s approval to use substandard goods. The party that was deceived in the contract, relied upon the fraudulent statements made by the other side.

Combined With Other Defenses

By itself, unclean hands is not the most powerful defense that you can use. But it is often combined with other defenses–again, in the example above with the contract, the person being sued would likely allege fraud, and unclean hands. If you felt that someone else lied to you to get you to sign an agreement, you might allege both fraud in the inducement, and unclean hands.

Making Things Fair

Courts do have the ability to do equity–in other words, to just do what is morally correct.

If a court feels that someone did something to cause the other side to breach the contract, or that the party seeking to enforce a contract for some reason morally or ethically should not benefit from some kind of wrongdoing–an unclean hands defense may be successful.

Need to defend or bring a breach of contract case? Call our Fort Lauderdale business and commercial litigation attorneys at Sweeney Law P.A. at 954-440-3993 for help.

Source:

content.next.westlaw.com/practical-law/document/Id4cf197ef3ad11e28578f7ccc38dcbee/Unclean-Hands-Doctrine?viewType=FullText&transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)