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Health Call of Detroit v. Atrium Home & Health Care Services9/8/2005
that Williams terminated her contract with plaintiff and entered an agreement with Atrium only to secure continuity of care, damages might plausibly be measured on the basis of the continued provision of care for Williams by the defendant nurses. Therefore, were we not constrained by the holding in Environair, we would find that plaintiff is not limited merely to the recovery of nominal damages for tortious interference with its independent contract agreements with the defendant nurses or for breach by the defendant nurses of the non-competition clause of the independent contract agreements. [Health Call, supra at 85-86.]
Indeed, this case presents a unique factual situation in which the home nursing services provided to Williams and Harris by defendant nurses continued to be provided by those same nurses despite the change in the corporate entities servicing Williams and Harris. Within the four corners of the Environair opinion, there is no indication of such ongoing relationships or links. This, along with the fact that the Greenheck-Environair contract was subject to at-will termination, lent support to the court's conclusion that there was no tangible basis upon which damages could be assessed and thus any damage award would be unacceptably speculative. However, the Health Call panel chose not to distinguish the case from Environair on the basis of the facts. This raises a subject worthy of further inquiry bearing on the analytical framework of this opinion.
We must construe Environair as standing for the proposition that damages arising out of or related to the termination of an at-will contract are speculative as a matter of law in all cases as there is no tangible basis upon which damages can be assessed. This interpretation is mandated as a result of the ruling in Health Call and the special order calling for conflict resolution. The Health Call panel found that factual circumstances exist that could reasonably support an award of future damages by the trier of fact that are not overly speculative or uncertain; therefore, plaintiff should not be limited to a recovery of nominal damages pursuant to the summary disposition ruling. Health Call, supra at 85-86. But this Court found itself constrained by Environair to hold that only nominal damages are recoverable, essentially as a matter of law. Id. at 86. This holding necessarily reflected that the Court did not believe that it was at liberty to factually distinguish the case from Environair with respect to facts outside of those establishing that an at-will contract was terminated upon which damages are sought. In other words, termination of an at-will contract allows, at best, only nominal damages. Future lost profits under the contract are not recoverable regardless of all the other surrounding circumstances. Therefore, the conflict that existed in the minds of the Health Call panel was that Environair permitted no more than nominal damages any time a party sought damages arising from or related to the termination of an at-will contract, while it, the Health Call panel, would allow more than nominal damages under the right factual conditions, present here according to the panel, despite the at-will nature of the underlying contract.
When this Court was polled under MCR 7.215(J) and voted that there was an outcome-determinative issue in conflict that required resolution by a special panel, the Court necessarily adopted the Health Call panel's assessment, implicit in part, that Environair controlled the outcome, that Environair set forth a blanket rule of only nominal damages, and that factual distinctions were irrelevant. If this were not the case, there would be no outcome-determinative conflict issue to resolve. For example, i
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