Court Opinion

ID: 9709777
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 03:54:35.124135+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:51.410350
License: Public Domain

PRESIDING JUSTICE CAHILL, dissenting: I respectfully dissent. This is a voluntary undertaking case. The majority accurately and carefully sets out the law in Illinois that governs a voluntary undertaking. We disagree about the application of the law to the facts of this case. The Truss Plate Institute (TPI) was under no duty to publish and distribute “recommendations” for bracing wood trusses, but when it undertook to do so, TPI placed itself within the scope of section 324A of the Restatement (Restatement (Second) of Torts § 324A (1965)). The majority appears to adopt TPI’s characterization of the Green Sheet, which uses words like “guide,” “recommendations,” “advisory,” and “general instructions.” But when we examine the Green Sheet we confront a photographic reduction of an 18-page pamphlet of detailed written instructions and 18 engineering drawings that show you how to brace wood trusses while erecting a roof. Anyone who has opened a box of unassembled bicycle parts on Christmas Eve and set about putting the parts together from the instructions and illustrations in the box will have a good idea of what the Green Sheet is: a blueprint for assembly of a complex mechanism. The euphemisms used by TPI and borrowed by the majority to describe the document do not accurately describe the Green Sheet or what TPI undertook to do. The majority’s argument that no duty is owed (even if the Green Sheet is an undertaking), because the relationship between TPI and the carpenters is remote and without oversight and control, is also unpersuasive. The deposition of the managing director of TPI included admissions that the “mission” of TPI is “to maintain the *** industry on a sound engineering basis” and that the intended audience for the Green Sheet is truss installers in the field. When those statements and the Green Sheet are measured in light of section 324A, the undertaking of a duty strikes me as clear. The majority’s “narrow construction” argument based on Frye v. Medicare-Glaser Corp., 153 Ill. 2d 26, 605 N.E.2d 557 (1992), also strikes me as unpersuasive. In Frye, the pharmacist omitted a label from a prescription bottle. The case can be distinguished. Here, TPI undertook to draft and disseminate a precise method for trussing a wood roof, omitting nothing. Blalock v. Syracuse Stamping Co., 584 F. Supp. 454 (E.D. Pa. 1984), as an analogy for this case is far afield, remote, to borrow a word from the majority. The injured third party in Blalock never saw or relied on the safety inspections of the insurer. Here, the Green Sheet was placed in the hands of carpenters and TPI intended that its bracing “recommendations” be used in the field. They were used, and, as a result, it is alleged, part of the roof collapsed. Among the cases cited earlier in the opinion, I would only note that both Evenson v. Osmose Wood Preserving, Inc., 760 F. Supp. 1345 (S.D. Ind. 1990), and Klein v. Council of Chemical Associations, 587 F. Supp. 213 (E.D. Pa. 1984), went out on summary judgment because the trade associations did not manufacture, distribute, design, or test the chemicals that caused the injury. By contrast, the “product” in this case was not the assembled wood trusses, but the design for them contained in the Green Sheet. As for FNS Mortgage Service Corp. v. Pacific General Group, Inc., 24 Cal. App. 4th 1564, 29 Cal. Rptr. 2d 916 (1994), which the majority cites, but discounts, it will come as no surprise that I believe it is the most soundly reasoned case in the majority opinion. Finally, the majority alludes, in passing, to a dispute about who was responsible for the outdated Green Sheet being in the hands of the carpenters, and to liability disclaimers in the Green Sheet. As I read the record, these issues prompted material factual disputes, inappropriate for summary judgment. I would reverse summary judgment for TPI and remand this case for trial.