If you think you're the type of person who might one day sue your business partners for being jerks, then maybe you should get more than a verbal contract about your role in the venture. The brief doesn't include any written evidence of any sort about their agreements and explains that the entirety of their contract was verbal.
IANAL but should that invalidate his claim entirely? An agreement is an agreement right? It might be he said/he said, but presumably he can show some evidence that he was involved as an operator. And if that's the case, he may be entitled to something and I wouldn't consider it total BS if that happened.
This strikes me as different than what happened with Facebook.
I think what your really getting at is a verbal agreement is still enforceable. As is always the case in law the answer is: "maybe."
In order to be enforceable certain agreements/contracts MUST be in writing to be enforceable. It is a contract principle known as "Statute of Frauds", but despite the name has absolutely nothing to do with fraud. Some examples include contracts for the sale of real estate, contracts that will take more than a year to perform, and I think marriage agreements.
Although you are most likely correct, the verbal agreement might be enforceable here, but it is certain the Defendant's attorneys will argue the Statute of Frauds applies; therefore, since the agreement is not in writing it is unenforceable. To speculate on how a Judge would rule on this preliminary matter would be inappropriate without benefit of all the evidence obtained through discovery.
For Statute of Frauds to matter in this case, it will have to be proven that the terms of the contract must have taken more than one year, but not an indefinitely long time to perform. Otherwise, any type of verbal contract should cover this, whether that be oral or written or anything else.
>Although you are most likely correct, the verbal agreement might be enforceable here,
>but it is certain the Defendant's attorneys will argue the Statute of Frauds applies; therefore, since the agreement is not in writing it is unenforceable.
>To speculate on how a Judge would rule on this preliminary matter would be inappropriate without benefit of all the evidence obtained through discovery.
