Law Offices of John P. Martin

The law wants people to get paid for the work they perform. Also, the law wants to prevent people from being unjustly enriched by the work of others.

These are two of the reason for the enforcement of contracts, both verbal and written.

But what about when there is no contract, or the contract does not cover all the work provided?

For these situations there is the doctrine of quantum meruit. It is a Latin phrase that translates to “as much as he deserves.” The rule allows service providers to get paid a reasonable payment even in the absence of a contract. If the service provided is of the type the that one should expect to pay for, then the provider can collect what they are owed by applying the doctrine of quantum meruit. The primary limitation is that you cannot bring quantum meruit claim for breach of contract. The services provided must not be covered under an existing contract.

Under quantum meruit the service provider can obtain a judgment against those who benefited from the service. The amount of the judgment will be calculated based on a “reasonable” fee for the service. Typically, the service provider’s regular fees and costs will be considered reasonable.

Accordingly, always document your time and expenses when you perform work for someone even if they promise to pay you a fixed fee at the completion of the job. If they renege then your time sheets and records will be used to calculate the judgment award under quantum meruit.

The bottom line: if anyone tries to avoid paying your fees, and there is no contract, the law still provides you a remedy.

Oracle has filed a lawsuit against a SAP subsidiary, TommorrowNow, Inc.
TommorrowNow is a company that provide software support for an Oracle owned product (PeopleSoft). Oracle is claiming that TommorrowNow’s programmers are unlawfully accessing Oracle’s maintenance and support facilities.

However, the third party programmers are accessing the Oracle knowledge base at the direction of the their clients. Clients who have valid access rights to the information based on their license agreements with Oracle. In other words, the TommorrowNow programmers appear to be acting as agents for the Oracle licensee. Thus, it is should be legal for them to access the Oracle knowledge tools and support tools.

If Oracle get’s its way then third party contractors would be shut out of the lucrative maintenance market for enterprise applications. Making the corporations that rely on these products more locked in than ever.

Oracle’s 43-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, focuses on SAP’s TomorrowNow, a third-party provider of support services for Oracle’s PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel product lines. SAP acquired TomorrowNow in 2005 and operates the business as an independent subsidiary. TomorrowNow specializes in picking off Oracle customers and converting them to its own, lower-cost maintenance and support offerings.

Oracle claims in its legal filing that SAP TomorrowNow employees have used the log-in credentials of several about-to-depart Oracle customers to log in and download huge swaths of Oracle software and support material.

source: www.crn.com

Analyst Ray Wang doesn’t pull punches. He said the current situation stinks, likening it to IBM’s lock on mainframe hardware in the 1970s. Major software vendors are not giving third-party maintenance providers the access necessary for providing a high level of support, in Wang’s view. As a result, CIOs are held hostage to annual maintenance fees that can run to 25% of the contract.

source: searchcio.com