Cour de cassation 1ère Chambre civile; 2022-07-06; 1re Civ., 6 juillet 2022, pourvoi n° 20-50.029
Decision by national courts in the field of European Union law — ECLI:FR:CCASS:2022:C100587
Date: 2022-07-06
Subject matter: Judicial cooperation in civil matters
Origin: France

82022FR0706(51)_ENG_SUMJURE
JURE summary
JURE summary
In this case, the Cour de Cassation (hereinafter ‘the Supreme Court’) had to determine whether a law firm was liable to its client for the dismissal of an appeal to the Supreme Court.
The plaintiff was an employee of the Royal Bank of Scotland Public Limited Company (hereinafter ‘the bank’). He was authorised to perform part of his work at home in the United Kingdom. Afterwards, he moved to France, where he kept working from home, except for one day per week when he worked in London. He was eventually made redundant, for which he sued his former employer before the French courts. The case was brought before the cour d’appel de Douai (hereinafter ‘the Court of Appeal’), which held that the French courts did not have jurisdiction.
The plaintiff instructed the law firm Lyon-Caen et Thiriez (hereinafter ‘the defendant’) to appeal to the Supreme Court. The appeal was dismissed; contending that the defendant was at fault, the plaintiff requested the opinion of the council of the bar representing the lawyers at the Conseil d’État and the Supreme Court (1), which considered that the defendant was not liable.
The plaintiff made an application before the Supreme Court. He requested, inter alia, payment of the sums he could allegedly have gotten if he had been successful before the Supreme Court, claiming he would have been if the defendant had lodged a proper appeal.
The plaintiff submitted three pleas. He argued that the defendant should have:
1.      submitted a body of concordant clues demonstrating that his work should be localized in France; the plaintiff argued, inter alia, that he was retroactively hired by the French branch of the bank, and that Article 19 of the Brussels I Regulation (2) gives to the employee a right to sue his employer at a lesser cost, before the courts for the place where he is domiciled;
2.      claimed that the Court of Appeal ‘misrepresented the forms of order sought by the parties or failed to understand the subject matter of the dispute concerning the assessment of the fact that the parties clearly intended [the plaintiff] to work in France on a stable and long-term basis’ (3);
3.      claimed that the Court of Appeal wrongly used the terms ‘tolerance’ and ‘provisional derogation’ to describe the fact that the bank agreed for the plaintiff to work in France.
The Supreme Court rejected the first plea on the grounds that the defendant claimed that the Court of Appeal had ignored the actual working conditions of the plaintiff, and that invoking his retroactive hiring would have amounted to submitting new factual evidence, which would have been inadmissible before the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court also rejected the second and third pleas, on the grounds that the plaintiff alleged a verbal agreement to his working in France, so that the Court of Appeal did not misrepresent the forms of order sought by the parties or failed to understand the subject matter of the dispute when it stated: ‘[the defendant] never agreed to relocate in France its employee’s workplace: indeed, when [the plaintiff] was working at home for part of the week even though he was no longer domiciled in the United Kingdom, he benefited from a tolerance that must be regarded as a provisional derogation’.
The plaintiff’s application was dismissed.
(1) In French: conseil de l’Ordre des Avocats au Conseil d’État et à la Cour de Cassation.
(2) Council Regulation (EC) No 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters.
(3) Quotation of the plaintiff’s plea as reported by the Supreme Court.