Paramount Office Supply Co., Inc. v. D.A. MacIsaac, Inc.
| Decision Date | 22 April 1987 |
| Docket Number | No. 86-344-M,86-344-M |
| Citation | 524 A.2d 1099 |
| Parties | PARAMOUNT OFFICE SUPPLY COMPANY, INC. v. D.A. MacISAAC, INC., et al. P. |
| Court | Rhode Island Supreme Court |
This case comes to us on a petition for a common-law writ of certiorari wherein Paramount Office Supply Company, Inc. (Paramount), seeks to review a decision of the Superior Court denying the application of Paramount for injunctive relief. We affirm.
The relevant circumstances precipitating the petition are as follows. Paramount initiated this action for injunctive relief on July 10, 1986. In its complaint Paramount alleged that defendant, David W. Tobias (Tobias), a former employee of Paramount, wrongfully expropriated a customer list belonging to Paramount and was utilizing that list in the course of his employment with the codefendant, D.A. MacIsaac, Inc. (MacIsaac), a competitor in the office-products-supply business. Paramount further alleged that Tobias and MacIsaac had wrongfully conspired to expropriate its customer list and that as a result Tobias and MacIsaac had induced some of Paramount's customers to leave.
On July 15, 1986, a justice of the Superior Court issued a temporary restraining order enjoining Tobias and MacIsaac from "making any contact with [Paramount's] customers until further order of the court." A hearing on a preliminary injunction was then scheduled and the parties submitted memoranda of law and affidavits. The determination of the preliminary-injunction request was rendered by the trial justice upon affidavits submitted by Tobias and MacIsaac. According to the record before us Paramount presented no witnesses, nor did it submit any affidavits at the preliminary-injunction hearing; it relied exclusively upon its complaint and memorandum of law.
By affidavit Tobias indicated that he had been working as a salesman in the office-supply business for twenty-two years, the last eleven years with Paramount. Tobias never entered into a written contract of employment, nor did he ever enter into a covenant not to compete with Paramount. He left Paramount because a growing number of customers whom he served were dissatisfied and were reducing their volume of business with the company. Sometime in November 1985 Tobias learned through a coworker that MacIsaac, a Boston-based company, was considering opening a facility in Rhode Island. Tobias contacted Donald MacIsaac, president of MacIsaac, and a series of meetings ensued at which the two discussed Tobias's possible employment with MacIsaac. In March 1986, Tobias and MacIsaac reached an employment agreement under which he was scheduled to begin work in July 1986.
When Tobias left Paramount's employ, he took with him a customer list containing only the names of customers he had personally developed or those that had been assigned to him by Paramount. He did not have Paramount's complete customer list. The list that Tobias carried with him contained the names and addresses of the customers as well as the customer's discount rates, salesman's commission rate, and sales-tax status. Tobias copied only the names and addresses of the customers and then destroyed his original list.
Tobias also averred that Paramount never tried to keep its customer list confidential. The list was kept on a Rolodex file to which anyone and everyone, employee and nonemployee, had potential access. In addition, everyone in the office had a written list of customers to which new accounts were periodically added but from which old nonactive accounts were never purged. Furthermore, Tobias, in his uncontradicted affidavit, stated that he at no time contacted Paramount's customers on behalf of MacIsaac while still employed with Paramount, that the list of Paramount's customers was readily identifiable from the Yellow Pages and business and trade directories, and that many of Paramount's customers do business with more than one office-supply company, some in fact do business with three or four at a time. Donald MacIsaac, in his affidavit, echoed much of Tobias's averments.
The trial justice at the close of counsel arguments found that while Tobias was still employed by Paramount, Tobias and Donald MacIsaac had met solely to discuss possible employment and "not for the purpose of damaging the reputation of plaintiff." He found no facts to warrant an injunction...
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