Equipment Loan Agreement I Understand That: The Equipment Has: Fill & Download for Free

[edit after some interesting comments: as long as an employee is happy to have money deducted, they should let it happen whether or not the deduction is legal. Thank you, loyal readers, for comments.]I am only licensed to practice in Oregon. I really enjoy illegal deduction cases. They are the easiest cases I take on. I especially like cases where the employment is terminated, because that illegal deduction counts as failure to pay all wages on termination, so there is a claim for $200 or actual damages on the illegal deduction, ORS 652.615, and a claim for up to 30 days (240 hours) of penalty wages under ORS 652.150. In addition, there is almost certainly a claim for attorney fees under ORS 652.200, and that is a one-way claim. The employer cannot recover fees under that statute even if the employer wins on that claim. That is a huge incentive for employers to pay claims and to settle them quickly once the case is filed, so most of my illegal deduction cases don’t even get to a hearing on the “merits.”Your question says “your boss illegally deducted wage from you.” Illegal deductions are things like deducting wages for tools you use on the job, deducting money for short tills or damage to equipment or merchandise, deducting money for failing to turn in uniforms or equipment. Many employers have valid claims to those things, they just don’t understand that they cannot help themselves to wages. They can ask for payment, and discipline the employee if they refuse to pay, but they cannot take advantage of their economic power by simply holding money out of wages.Some deductions are usually legal but not when it results in the employee earning less than minimum wage.A common illegal deduction is the final paycheck repayment for a loan the employer made to the employee. In Oregon, the employer has to refer to the garnishment statutes and cannot withhold more for their loan than they could if the wages were garnished, so 25% of wages after taxes, and there are minimum exemptions. One of my favorite cases was where a guy called and he had all kinds of grievances about how badly he’d been treated by his employer and I was saying over and over “there’s nothing illegal about an employer being a jerk/getting mad/swearing/being unprofessional” He was getting really discouraged, and I was getting really tired of the conversation and was looking at my clock. Then he made some comment about the employer taking about $500 out of his last check to repay a loan and I sat up, asked for the numbers off his check stub, calculated it and said “that’s very interesting to me. I can work with that. How soon can you come here?” He said “the person at BOLI [the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries] told me that was OK because I signed an agreement.” I said “who do you want to take legal advise from, the person who answers a phone at a government office or a lawyer who wants to take your case?”On the subject of written authorization, some deductions are legal, but must be approved in writing. Some are illegal whether or not the employee signs an agreement to have them deducted.It is an illegal deduction to take money out of the paycheck to pay something and then not pay it. Like holding out insurance deductions and not pay the insurance company, or taking out child support but not forwarding that to the agency. These are all very attractive to me.So my answer is call a wage and hour lawyer. See if a lawyer in your jurisdiction will talk to you over the phone. You may get a nice extra paycheck.

While I was in the process of shutting down my law practice to go sailing offshore, I got a call from a friend who had been very kind to me when I was starting up asking me for a favor. I won’t go into the background, but the debt was one of honor and I’d had no prior chance to repay it. All I had to do was represent a man whose office building was in foreclosure and who had filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case. The trustee of the business had brought suit against him alleging that he and his brother had looted the business for tens of thousands of dollars and trying to deny him a discharge, among other things.So I agreed to meet with the man. I remembered him slightly from a murder trial in Miami some years before when he had been the alleged lover of a wealthy woman married to an much older man. The older man had supposedly fallen/been pushed off of a 40th story balcony and fell to his death. The two were charged with murder, but not convicted. Supposedly he had received a large sum of money to keep silent, and had invested heavily in real estate right before a terrible recession in that area.Anyway, I met with him. He had a particularly large loft on top of the office building, private elevator and all and he wanted to give me a tour. Fine with me since I could get some sense of what kind of person he was by agreeing. To him, the highlight of the tour (and this was all in a really large room with windows on two sides and a very high ceiling) was his heart-shaped bed with, of course, a red satin bedspread. The bed was on a little platform raised several steps above the floor. He started talking about all the audio-video equipment that surrounded the bed, including cameras. I said “you mean at your age, you still need instructional videos?” He said “you don’t like me, do you.” I replied “not at all, but I will represent you provided you hold up your end of the agreement with [my friend].”So began a six-month saga. I took over the defense of the litigation and asked to see the documents that the trustee thought supported his case. I was shown to a room where the large table was covered with boxes of paper, and which had filing cabinets everywhere. There was no way I was going to go through all that for a free case so I asked to speak with the trustee to get a summary. They agreed and it gave me a chance to get to understand the trustee. This guy had amassed these stacks of paper on his belief that my new client was a bad guy who deserved being sentenced to execution, but failing that, should have to suffer. The interesting thing was that he couldn’t summarize the case.Trial begins and it rapidly becomes apparent that the plaintiff is going to insist on putting everyone of those papers, charges, graphs and so on into evidence. The judge who was hearing the case was a new, political appointee with very little understanding of finance beyond car loans. I doubted that she would be able to follow and understand the trustee’s case since his lawyers weren’t explaining it, just putting box after box of paper into the record. The trial continued over several months in 1–2 hour sessions. I had to order transcripts every time one of those sessions came up just to keep track of what was being done.In all this, my jerk client, who kept calling women “girls”, had created a series of shell entities and had appointed as presidents and CEOs the several young women who were, shall I say, romantically involved with him. We were trying this case before a woman judge. I was trying to coach him out of being a jerk when his time came to testify. But it became apparent to me that no amount of restraint short of a permanent gag was going to do any good.By this time, my friend had resolved his issues with the client so I filed the first of several motions seeking to be allowed to withdraw. All of them were denied. The client and I had several yelling arguments - something that had never happened to me before. He said at one point that he knew I was just trying to get him to fire me. I said that I was sure he had that effect on a lot of people. But my motions kept getting denied.Comes the great day when the plaintiff has announced they have nearly concluded their case, but of course had a few more boxes of documents. The biggest core of the arguments with my client was because he thought I should be fighting to keep all this paper out. I tried to explain to him that, what with the on-off nature of the trial, the plaintiff’s inability to summarize what it all meant, that the more paper they put into evidence, the less likely that the judge was going to spend the hours and hours of work it would have taken to make sense of it all. His best bet would be a finding that the plaintiff hadn’t proven their case because no one understood what it was, and for that to happen, all that paper was important. My whole trial strategy was just to let the plaintiff stuff the record with so much junk, and then not explain it, that dismissal was likely. The client, however, wanted me to keep the paper out. I had to assume that he understood what all the paper said but the important thing was that the plaintiff only believed what it said and didn’t know how to present it. The danger was that at the end of their case, they might “sum up” the evidence and actually explain it.We were on the last day of their case and I have not been objecting to anything. The client finally blew up in the courtroom, told the judge I was trying to get him to fire me, and amazingly, she asked me if I wanted to renew my requests to withdraw. This judge and I had not gotten along very well during her time on the bench, but there hadn’t been anything said or done that was unprofessional. On her request, I did orally move to withdraw since the plaintiff’s case was over and he had no defense. She not only granted it, but read into the record a statement about what an excellent job I had done, how I had served the purpose of the law in ensuring a fair trial, and a lot of other things. Basically, she was protecting me from my client suing me for malpractice. And then she granted my motion. I asked for a recess to confer with the client to prevent any disruption of the trial.I took him into a conference room, again explained the burden of proof and the importance of letting the plaintiff fail to prove the case by not explaining anything. I told him that he needed to do only to things: 1) apologize to the judge for his outburst, and 2) say he moved to dismiss the case because the plaintiff hadn’t proved it. This latter was even better coming from him, since it was what you would expect him to say if he was sane, and the judge wouldn’t pay any attention to it. Further, he wouldn’t have to try to explain anything for the plaintiff. Just say that, sit down and shut up.Amazingly, he actually did what I told him. So the trial ended that day and the judge took the matter under “advisement”. Two years later, she ruled that the plaintiff hadn’t proven their case. By then, it was old news so no one even took an appeal. If a mess like that had been presented to a law clerk for an appellate court, who was confronted with a room full of boxes to go through to see if the judge was correct, the decision would just have been affirmed. But there was no appeal.By then, I was fully retired and somewhere in the Caribbean. The guy never apologized for being a jerk to me, but I’d repaid the favor and was glad to be out of of it all.Absolutely the worse case I ever tried. A new, inexperienced judge, a complete jerk for a client who probably had done whatever the trustee thought they were proving, tons of paper, and a plaintiff and set of lawyers who seemed to think that trials were won by the weight of the evidence rather than actual presentation of a narrative. John Quincey Adams in the film of the Amistad trial as saying “when I was an attorney, a long time ago, young man, I err... I realized after much trial and error, that in the courtroom, whoever tells the best story wins. In unlawyer-like fashion, I give you that scrap of wisdom free of charge. “ It is something that should be carved in marble over the door to every court. It doesn’t mean or justify lies. It means that the trial lawyer has to tell the story of the case in a way that the factfinder, whether judge or jury, can follow and understand. The plaintiff and his lawyers either didn’t know that, or never heard the quote. And they lost because their story wasn’t told in any coherent manner. If I had fought over the admission of all those papers, first it would make the client look like he had things to hide, but also I might inadvertently explain their case to the judge. Another legal adage: never try the other side’s case for them.

Well, I’ve seen similar situations and please excuse me while I smack my ruler on your knuckles for not getting something in writing. Now I’m going to stand on my soapbox and tell you that the days of agreements sealed with handshakes and good intentions are long gone. And this is exactly the reason why. *sigh*OK, so bad news is that you did not have the landlord’s permission to occupy the premises. I’m assuming that the party that defaulted never mentioned it to the landlord, SO the landlord is considering the equipment you left on the property as a means of satisfying the unpaid bills.I don’t know how the laws differ from state to state, but in Hawaii, you could petition the court to authorize the removal of all properties owned by your company. You’d have to show that your relationship is purely as a third party vendor and not a subsidiary or sister company, and proof of ownership of all equipment you want to claim, such as your loan paperwork for said equipment, if you have a loan, or I’ve seen situations where a company has used its equipment as collateral for other business financing and the bank or other institution doing the funding holds a lien on the equipment, and that has been submitted as proof.You definitely need an attorney. I don’t know how long you have until they sell your equipment, but from what I understand, until you file that petition and claim ownership, that equipment is collateral damage and I’d bet an assessment has already been made as to the equipment’s worth.Please, please, PLEASE don’t ever leave your valuable property under another entity or individual’s name without a properly executed and notarized agreement. People just don’t have the same sense of honor as they used to.Good luck,K