What is Tortious Interference with a Business Relationship?

It is illegal, and you can get sued for interfering with someone’s business relationships. But just what is a business relationship—and how do you know when it is illegal to tamper with it? Or on the other hand, if you are the one whose business relationship has been harmed, how do you know when you can sue for tortious interference with business relationships?

Contracts and Relationships

It is illegal for anybody to do anything to interfere with your existing business contracts. So, inducing someone to break a contract, or knowingly doing something that you know will force that person to break a contract, can get you sued.

But often, professional relationships between people or businesses don’t have a written contract. It’s just an ongoing but informal business relationship, and one that, based on history, both parties anticipate to continue into the future, even in the absence of any written contract obligating them to do so.

This can make a claim for tortious interference with a business relationship, more difficult to prove. There isn’t a definitive, written contract that is being interfered with.

What is a Relationship?

To have a business relationship, two businesses or parties must have regular, ongoing commerce or business relationships between them.

So, for example, imagine that a pet store had a continuing relationship with a dog groomer, who comes into the store and grooms dogs. They have no contract, no ongoing agreement—but they have worked together in this way for years.

If another pet store were to convince that dog groomer to leave his or her current store, to go to the new one, the old store may have a claim for tortious relationship with business relations.

Of course, businesses are free to compete with each other for customers or clients or contractors, or anybody who is on the open market to be hired for goods and services. Open competition isn’t tortious interference.

What is Interference?

Even if you know what a business relationship is, and you’ve defined it—what constitutes wrongful or tortious interference with those relationships?

Many courts have said that the interference must be something that rises to the level of fraud or misrepresentation, or deceit. Others have said that it may even have to rise to the level of what would be criminal activity.

So, in our example above, simply offering the dog groomer more money to come to work at your pet store may not be tortious interference. But inducing the groomer to leave by promising her things that you don’t plan on delivering, only to take her away from your competitor, may rise to the level of tortious interference.

Damages

Damages can also be more difficult, because there is no contract to look at, and see what was lost as a result of the interference. That means that courts will have to look at the prior history of the businesses, to see what they may have lost as a result of the interference.

Call our Fort Lauderdale business lawyers at Sweeney Law P.A. at 954-440-3993 for help if your contracts or business relationships have been wrongfully altered by another person or business.

Source:

law.cornell.edu/wex/tortious_interference