Court Opinion

ID: 9676599
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:28:23.392137+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:49.722779
License: Public Domain

CARL R. GAERTNER, Presiding Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. The protracted litigation between plaintiff and defendant involves a single claim, viz. plaintiffs claim against defendant for an attorney’s fee. In the original interpleader action plaintiff asserted that claim by seeking approval of the arbitration award. The trial court denied his claim for an attorney’s fee and vacated the award. Plaintiff’s appeal from that judgment was dismissed because of his personal alteration of the transcript after it had been approved by the trial court and his omission from the record on appeal of the crucial testimony of three witnesses. Dean Witter Reynolds, Inc. v. Corley, 699 S.W.2d 21 (Mo.App.1985). Upon dismissal of his appeal, the judgment of the trial court that he was not entitled to an attorney’s fee became final. Now he seeks to assert his claim to the same attorney’s fee by alleging breach of contract and fraud. Regardless of the number of variant theories by which he may seek to recover, plaintiff has but a single claim against the defendant. This claim for attorney’s fees is barred by the principle of res judicata.
*915In Dreckshage v. Community Federal Savings & Loan Ass’n, 641 S.W.2d 831, 833-34 (Mo.App.1982) and again in Burke v. Doerflinger, 663 S.W.2d 405, 408 (Mo.App.1983) this court expressed its approval of the rule set forth in the Restatement of Judgments, 2d, § 24:
(1) When a valid and final judgment rendered in an action extinguishes the plaintiffs claim pursuant to the rules of merger or bar (see §§ 18, 19), the claim extinguished includes all rights of the plaintiff to remedies against the defendant with respect to all or any part of the transaction, or series of connected transactions, out of which the action arose.
Section 25 of the Restatement provides:
The rule of § 24 applies to extinguish a claim by the plaintiff against the defendant even though the plaintiff is prepared in the second action
“(1) to present evidence or grounds or theories of the case not presented in the first action, or
(2) to seek remedies or forms of relief not demanded in the first action.”
Particularly apropos to the instant case is Comment D of § 25 of the Restatement:
Having been defeated on the merits in one action, a plaintiff sometimes attempts another action seeking the same or approximately the same relief but adducing a different substantive law premise or ground. This does not constitute the presentation of a new claim when the new premise or ground is related to the same transaction or series of transactions, and accordingly the second action should be held barred.
I am constrained to disagree with the conclusion of the majority that an action seeking recovery of an attorney’s fee pursuant to an arbitration award is a different claim than that asserted in an action seeking recovery of an attorney’s fee based upon breach of contract or fraud.
The question of whether the interpleader court correctly followed the directives of § 435.405, RSMo. 1986, is not before us in this case. Whatever complaint plaintiff may have had regarding the decision in the interpleader case vanished when he altered the transcript and filed an incomplete record on appeal from the judgment entered therein.1
I find the discussion of Rule 55.32(f) equally irrelevant. If the effect of denominating parties as co-defendants in an inter-pleader action is to relieve them of the strictures of res judicata, then a rule of procedure has the effect of changing substantive rights in violation of Article V, § 5 of the Missouri Constitution. A jury’s determination of issues fully litigated between co-defendants is conclusive of those issues in a separate trial between the two defendants. See Hudson v. Carr, 668 S.W.2d 68 (Mo. banc 1984). Although Rule 55.32(f) permits co-defendants to file separate actions against each other, they do so at the risk of being preclusively bound by the adjudication of issues fully litigated in the earlier action. Plaintiff’s claim against defendant for an attorney’s fee was determined adversely to him in the interpleader action and that determination is final. The doctrine of res judicata applies not only to those points actually raised, but also to “ ‘every point which properly belongs to the subject of litigation, and which the parties, exercising reasonable diligence, might have brought forward at the time.’ ” Moore v. Beck, 664 S.W.2d 15, 18 (Mo.App.1984) (quoting Autenrieth v. Bartley, 238 Mo.App. 55, 176 S.W.2d 546, 549 (1943)).

. I would also question the applicability of Pope Construction Co. v. State Highway Comm’n, 337 Mo. 30, 84 S.W.2d 920 (1935), the case relied upon by the majority. The language from that opinion quoted by the majority is pure dicta, the appeal having been dismissed by the Supreme Court on jurisdictional grounds. Moreover, the concept expressed by the quoted language is of doubtful validity since the adoption by the Missouri Legislature in 1980 of the Uniform Arbitration Act, and particularly § 435.350, rendering an agreement to arbitrate irrevocable.