Opinion ID: 3001487
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The $145,000 Invoice

Text: Keck Garrett first submits that the district court erred when it granted summary judgment for Nextel on the issue of whether it should pay the $145,000 invoice. In resolving this issue, the district court made three factual determinations, each of which is supported by the record: that Nextel did not assign any work to Keck Garrett, that Keck Garrett did not complete any properly assigned work and that the work it had submitted was of no value to Nextel. The district court also correctly determined that, from the first time it refused to pay the invoice, Nextel had maintained consistently that it would not pay the $145,000 because Keck Garrett had not been assigned any work under the 2003 blanket purchase order and because the work Keck Garrett had completed was of no value to Nextel. The record supports the district court’s determination that the 2003 blanket purchase order did not require Nextel to pay the $145,000 invoice. The 2003 blanket purchase order required Nextel to pay an invoice only upon Keck Garrett’s “submission of proper invoices or vouchers, the prices stipulated herein for work completed and/or Articles delivered and accepted, less any proper deductions or setoffs.” R.1 at 4. Even read broadly, the term “work completed” could not be understood to encompass work that was not requested by and was of no value to Nextel. It is undisputed that the work Keck Garrett submitted was of no value to Nextel. It also is undisputed that the work submitted by Keck Garrett was not re- quested by Nextel. In fact, the “work” consisted largely of documents Nextel had sent to Keck Garrett. No. 07-1350 13 Keck Garrett contends that Nextel only recently adopted the position that it refused to pay the invoice because the work was not requested by Nextel and was no value to it. Keck Garrett maintains that Nextel should not have been permitted to advance those arguments in its motion for summary judgment because they were inconsistent with its original position. We cannot accept this contention. In Nextel’s original letter to Keck Garrett, it stated: This body of work does not provide, nor do we feel it would have provided, any valuable or actionable findings, take aways or insights relative to the Falcon packaging project. Again, Nextel marketing communication did not pre-authorize any preliminary competitive research, design or design research and we were very clear throughout our communications in the first half of 2003 that the scope of our creative requirements was uncertain. R.52 at ¶ 119. This statement is consistent with Nextel’s position in the district court and on appeal. In its effort to establish that it was owed $145,000, Keck Garrett relied upon a handful of internal memoranda, e-mails between Keck Garrett and Nextel and documents that it had received from Nextel. The $145,000 invoice also included charges for employees waiting for the Falcon Project, even though Nextel had never requested that any Keck Garrett employee be placed on hold and even though the 2003 blanket purchase order did not place on Keck Garrett an obligation to accept any work from Nextel. The invoice also included a charge for the “insult” of Nextel’s having chosen another firm for its creative packaging needs. None of these charges fall within the terms of the 2003 blanket purchase order because they do not represent “work completed and/or Articles deliv14 No. 07-1350 ered and accepted.” The record simply will not support a conclusion that Keck Garrett completed work contemplated by the purchase order. Nor has Keck Garrett established any factual dispute that would deny Nextel summary judgment with respect to the $145,000 invoice.