A South Carolina attorney who claims a workplace rival defamed her and interfered with her employment contract can proceed with her lawsuit, a U.S. District Court judge found.
In denying the defendants’ motion to dismiss, Judge J. Michelle Childs cited the acrimonious relationship between the two employees as sufficient reason to allow the case to go before a jury.
Beverly Johns worked at Specialty Claims Management, a third-party claims processor for major insurance carriers, where she supervised files for Amtrust Underwriters. Higher-ups at Specialty say there was a major interpersonal conflict between Johns and Merreles Schumann, a program director for Amtrust who was responsible for overseeing Johns’ work.
In 2011, Schumann and two other Amtrust employees audited the company’s files, after which Schumann wrote an audit summary, which Johns now disputes, stating that the files handled by Johns’ unit “showed almost no presence in file of involvement by the supervisor.”
Schumann spoke with Johns’ supervisors at Specialty and asked that Johns no longer work on Amtrust’s files because they “weren’t satisfied with the performance in the files.” Unfortunately for Johns, Amtrust was a crucial client for Specialty, accounting for most of its business. When Specialty could not find another project on which Johns could be placed, her job was terminated, even though her supervisors said she was an excellent employee.
In her lawsuit against Amtrust and Schumann, Johns alleges that Schumann’s statement about the files lacking evidence of adequate supervision defamed her and constituted an intentional interference with her at-will employee contract.
On Jan. 27, Childs said both claims could go forward.
Childs said the central issue for the defamation claim was whether Schumann’s summary of the files was false, and that it was a genuine issue to present to the jury because Johns and Schumann “maintained an interpersonal conflict from which an ill-natured motive could be inferred.” For the same reason, Childs also declined to accept Amtrust’s arguments that the statements, even if defamatory, were privileged.
Childs also allowed the claim for interference with contract to proceed despite Amtrust’s argument that any interference was justified.
Child’s opinion suggests that South Carolina courts have yet to resolve which party bears the burden of proving whether or not the interference is justified, but Childs said that the majority of states have placed that weight on the defense. Once again, the conflict between Johns and Schumann created enough of an issue to send the question to a jury.
“Plaintiff has created a permissible inference of the absence of justification through the circumstantial evidence of the interpersonal conflict between Plaintiff and Defendant Schumann, the positive reviews of Plaintiff’s performance from her supervisors, and the allegedly atypical manner in which the audit was conducted,” Childs wrote in denying the motion.
The 13-page decision is Johns v. Amtrust Underwriters, Inc. (Lawyers Weekly No. 002-024-14). A full opinion digest is available online at sclawyersweekly.com.
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