So much for the customer always being right.

In a piece of litigation that somehow has escaped the attention (as far as we can tell) of the national media, the New England Patriots have sued a former season-ticketholder, apparently for $67,500.

Paul Minihane, who also happens to be a member of the Boston Finance Commission, signed a ten-year contract in 2002 for two premium seats at Gillette Stadium.  The contract contained a clause requiring the ticketholder to pay an accelerated lump sum representing the remaining price of the purchased tickets in the event that the ticketholder at any point failed to continue to make the required payments.

The club seats purchased by Minihame cost $3,750 per year.  He bought two of the seats.  Under the ten-year arrangement, the total cost was $75,000.  Minihane stopped making the payments after a year, and the Patriots want the balance of the $75,000 that Minihane would have paid.

The Boston Herald characterizes the fight as an issue of “liquidated damages,” which is a term of art that is used to describe pre-agreed damages amounts in circumstances where it will be difficult to determine the actual financial harm suffered in the event a contract is broken.  In this case, however, actual damages should be easy to calculate; if the customer’s tickets can’t be sold to someone else (and these are the Pats, not the Cardinals), then Minihane should be on the hook for the price.  If/when the tickets are sold, the Patriots should be allowed to recover any costs and other expenses incurred in the reselling process.

The other piece of legal mumbo-jumbo that potentially applies here is called ”mitigation of damages.”  It’s the concept that requires someone who has suffered harm to try to minimize it.  

In this case, if the tickets are $3,750 each per year, then the Patriots should be required to re-sell the seats, and Mihihane should get credit for whatever they receive.

As it currently stands, a lower court found that the team may keep Minihane’s $7,500 security deposit, and that he owes another $6,000.  Though $13,000 is still pretty steep, it’s a lot less than $67,500.

And so the Patriots want the highest court in Massachusetts to order Minihane to pay the difference.  The final outcome will depend on many things, such as the current contours of the applicable Massachusetts laws and the specific mindsets and biases and ideologies of the judges.

Regardless, the notion that the Pats will drop the hammer on a previously paying customer might shed a little light on the current concerns of a certain former employee who fears getting thrust involuntarily into the legal system if/when he chooses to speak about matters that he might have observed during his tenure with the team.