Tort Law

This page within Virginia Tort Case Law is a compilation of cases reported by the Virginia Supreme Court and summarized by Brien Roche dealing with the topic of Consequential Damages and the related topic of personal injury. For more information about the concept of consequential damages see the page on Wikipedia.  

Consequential Damages-Cases

1997 Long v. Abbruzzetti, 254 Va. 122, 487 S.E.2d 217.

Plaintiff sued escrow agent for attorney’s fees incurred in other litigation as a result of escrow agent’s supposed breach of escrow agreement. Direct contract damages are those which flow naturally or ordinarily from breach of contract. Consequential damages occur from intervention of special circumstances that are not ordinarily predictable but were within contemplation of all parties at time contract was made. Contemplation includes both circumstances that are actually foreseen and those that are reasonably foreseeable. If breach of contract is direct cause of other litigation resulting in attorney’s fee in that instance they are recoverable as direct damages. In this case, damages alleged were not direct and necessary cause of agent’s breach of escrow agreement, but rather were necessary result of Mrs. Abbruzzetti’s action in having plaintiff physically ejected and barred from restaurant in question, and therefore it is speculative as to whether such fees would have been incurred had Mrs. Abbruzzetti not taken this action. Therefore, damages are not consequential.

1954 Richmond Redev. & Hous. Auth. v. Laburnum Constr. Co., 195 Va. 827, 80 S.E.2d 574.

Consequential damages defined: “Such damage, loss or injury as does not flow directly and immediately from the act of the party, but only from some of the consequences or results of such act.”