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SCC Alameda Point LLC v. City of Alameda

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The City of Alameda owns more than a thousand acres of land that it acquired from the US Navy. Until the late 1990’s it had been a naval air station and it’s a very well situated parcel for commercial and residential development located really in the heart of the San Francisco Bay area. The city had entered a contract with a developer to negotiate over a master plan to develop that parcel called Alameda Point. So the city and the developer worked on a proposal, when that was done the voters in the city decided that wasn’t how they wanted to develop this parcel, so as a result, the city didn’t renew the contract. Now the developer filed a lawsuit claiming breach of contract seeking more than $100 million in loss profits and more than $17 million in their actual out of pocket expenses to come up with the plan over the years that they had worked with the city.

Now the city believed it had the right not to renew the contract but the contract itself, even if there were a breach contained some very important language that limited the liability of the city. So when this case got to court, we persuaded the judge that the most efficient way to resolve the entire litigation was to focus first on the meaning and interpretation of the contract and in particular the limitation of liability language. So as lead lawyer for the city, I mapped out a strategy of focusing on this key issue first and that had a few benefits.

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