Parking Lease Agreement: Fill & Download for Free

On my third jury trial, I realized I had been completely snookered when the plaintiff’s lawyer began his closing argument. It was a simple case. I was defending a store, which was part of a large national chain. The store had only been opened for a few months, and the contractor had failed to re-set the timers properly after the power had been cut off for a repair. Accordingly, because the the lights started clicking off early, the lot, which was located near a salt marsh in Atlantic City, became pitch black when the lights kicked off. The store management had called the landlord who called the contractor to get it fixed and they waited three days before coming to the store and re-setting the timers. In this case, the lights went out when the customer was in the store; she walked out, tripped over a parking block in the darkness, and banged up her face, including a very minor fracture of her nose. The plaintiff sued the store, the landlord, and the contractor. The Plaintiff’s demand was $10,000.Our defense was easy. We didn’t cut the power, we couldn’t reset the timers, only the landlord or contractor could, and we contacted the landlord on the first night when we noticed the problem. Oh, and the Plaintiff could have asked for assistance and we would have sent someone to escort her to her car.During discovery for over a year, the plaintiff’s lawyer acted very friendly and unassuming. Everything was cooperative. He was completely unaggressive, and unless we were in court, he dressed like a kid forced to find some random stuff in his dad’s closet to attend a last minute funeral. He took very short depositions, was completely friendly to my witnesses, and he seemed completely disinterested in the case against the store, and more focused on the case against the contractor.So, I had already won my first two jury trials and thought I was a real stud. During this trial, the plaintiff’s lawyer really seemed like he botched the cross examination of the contractor and landlord’s representatives, so I had to more aggressively get them to admit that they cut the power off, screwed up the timers, and delayed getting it fixed. I mean, I went to town, cross examined them with the phone messages, their policies, and basically got them to admit that they caused the problem and delayed getting it done.His client, a 60 year old lady, said that when she came into the store, the parking lot was well lit, and when she came out, it was very dark so she waited a few minutes to see if anybody from the store was going to help her, thought she could see her car, but tripped over the parking blocks.He put my manager on the stand. He got the manager to admit that the lights went out three nights in a row. He asked him if the lights went out the first night, and he admitted that they did. He asked them if he was able to get the lights back on the first night, and he said “no.” Then he asked what they did, and he said that he got the employees to grab flashlights and escort the customers to their car. He asked whether anybody got hurt, and the manager said, “no.” And the manager said, he called and left a message with the landlord that first night, telling him that the lights had gone out a few hours early, Then, the plaintiff’s lawyer asked the manager what happened the second night, and the manager said that the same thing happened also that night; the lights went out early, he got the employees to get the flashlights out, and then escorted the customers to their cars, nobody got hurt. The manager said that he called the landlord that night as well, saying that the lights went out again, and the timers needed to be reset.Then, the plaintiff’s lawyer asked the manager what happened the third night – the night when the plaintiff fell. The manager said that he assumed that the lights had been fixed earlier because he was told by some employees that there were trucks on the lot earlier that day. But the lights went out again. So this time the manager went to his office, made several calls to the landlord at various numbers, until he got the contractor’s number directly from the landlord, and then he did the same thing until he got the actual contractor and gave him an earful telling him that he needed to get to the store that evening and fix the lights once and for all. Then, after receiving assurances that the contractor would be there that evening, the manager finally hung up, and that’s when he heard someone had fallen in the lot. The plaintiff’s lawyer asked the manager whether he told the employees to grab the flashlights and escort the customers before he went into his office to make the calls, and the manager said, “no, he was too pissed off that it happened again, and wanted to make sure he got it fixed for good this time.” As a 27 year old hot shot kid, I thought he did well and made a good impression.So, I figure, the jury is going to be pissed off that the contractor never came out and feel bad for the poor store manager who did the right thing calling and letting the proper people know of the problem of the lights. After all, he was just as much a victim of the contractor’s incompetence as the plaintiff.I made my closing first and explained that the landlord and contractor were legally responsible for the parking lot and the lights, and technically, it wasn’t even the store’s responsibility under the lease agreement. I explained that many parking lots don’t even have parking lot lights, and everybody still has to look out for themselves. She certainly could have asked for an escort even if nobody went up there to volunteer.In this state, New Jersey, the plaintiff’s lawyer closes last. During his closing, the plaintiff’s lawyer got up and told the “bear story.” He said that I reminded him of the camper who went on a camping trip with his two friends. And, the campers heard a noise and realized that there was a grizzly bear outside the tent coming right for the three. He said that I started putting on my shoes, and one of the campers said, “are you crazy, you can’t outrun a bear!” And I turned to them, and said, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you two!” He explained that I had been playing the blame game the whole trial just trying to let the other two (landlord and contractor) hang out to dry. My manager chose to open a store with broken lights the third night, and knew what he had to do if the lights went out, just get some flashlights out and help the customers to the car. When he did that the first two nights, nobody got hurt. He said, my manager had all night and day to yell at anybody he wanted on the phone after his customers got to their cars safely. He said that his client had never heard of the landlord or the contractor before this trial. She went shopping at the store and figured the manager would make sure it was safe when she need to go home. He said his client was a 60 year old lady, and the only person she really cared to make herself pretty for was herself, her husband, and her friends at the library where she volunteered. She said that she noticed her nose was a little crooked and there was a bit of a scar around her eye. He said that even he didn’t really see it, but it made her self conscious and she thought about it every time she looked in the mirror.It was at this point that I realized I was completely screwed. The jury went out, deliberated 3 hours and came back with a $150,000 verdict, 15 times what the plaintiff asked for, and found the store 90% responsible and the landlord and contractor 5% a piece.Suffice to say, I learned more from that first loss than the first two I won, or any number of the other cases I won. The plaintiff’s lawyer had a very simple plan from the very beginning. He played to my own young overestimation of my abilities. And I stepped right in the trap. When I got back to the office, I called a more senior local lawyer to find out more about the plaintiff’s lawyer, he laughed and said that the plaintiff's lawyer was one of the best lawyers in the state. I was so arrogant, I never even bothered to check him out. That was about 23 years ago. Now, I try and be the unassuming guy who has a plan.For more background; the case went to trial largely because the store, landlord, and contractor were each blaming each other, and my client (the store) was demanding defense fees and indemnity under the lease agreement. The landlord’s insurer claimed that the indemnity only protected the store for the landlord’s own negligence, and not the store’s independent negligence, and therefore refused to pay the store’s defense costs or agree to pay for their share of any verdict assessed. The contractor’s insurer took a similar position. It basically became a “pissing contest” between three claims handlers and each one refused to pony up any money.After the verdict, the store filed a motion for judgment as a matter of law on our indemnity claim against the landlord, which was granted. So, initially, the judgment of liability against the store was shifted entirely onto the landlord, which prompted an appeal to the Appellate Division. This was good personally for me because it kept my client from losing faith in me or thinking that I was a total idiot. In the meantime, before the appeal was decided, I tried a few more cases for them which ended up being very good results. After more than a year, the intermediate appellate court determined that the lease agreement did not obligate the landlord to indemnify the store for the store’s own negligence, and because the store was found to be independently causally negligent, it had to pay its own share. By then, I had redeemed myself enough in this client’s eyes that I continued to get work.

So, my boyfriend was helping me move out of my place that I shared with 4 other girls during my freshman year of college. They all knew each other from highschool in a ghetto af town that they were cheerleaders in btw. He had just driven 5 hrs to come see me for the weekend and help out. He helped me pack up and move about half of my stuff from the second floor i was on down to the first floor, where i was hoping to have better roommates that wouldn't treat me like shit. It was the last day of me being there in my old room (and those girls knew that). We were tired of going up and down the stairs with all my stuff, so we decided to finish the rest in the morning and just go to sleep. We were in my old room at the time we decided so we just stayed there. An hour later, we wake up and ny roommates are playing loud music. Not in the living area… in the room. Now, it was a two person room in a four bedroom suite. The girl i was sharing with came in and said she was just getting something. ( She agreed much earlier that she was going to sleep with her friends anyways and that she didn't mind my bf being there) But when she came in she didn't leave, and she had her speaker with her. Then her friends came in, and they ignored us when we asked them to turn it down. The music was even making our neighbors complain to us. Not good, and we were tired. It was 1 am at this point. We asked again. Not a single response. I got up and asked them more directly. Nothing. My bf got annoyed and grabbed the speaker off the desk and turned it off himself. Immediately the bitchiest one grabbed it out of his hand and yelled at him to not touch her stuff and that she was going to call 'security'. He told them that they were being very rude to me and how he didn't like it, and that they should turn down the volume for everyone else. She walked out of the room and took two of the other girls with her. The original girl stayed to complain to us that it was her room and that she didn't invite him in. I reminded her that we already had an agreement and that it was still my room for the night. She told me to leave and that it wasn't my room. My bf told her no and that we're just trying to sleep. She argued that he still wasn't welcome and i told her that i welcome him. She stayed quiet and we decided to leave before the other girls got back. She wouldn't let us leave. They eventually came back and of course.. They brought friends. 7 guys, all drunk, walk into the room yelling at my bf. 'How dare you lay your hands on a girl? You can't just touch them how you like. You can't fucking try to take advantage of them.' Etc.. We see that they were obviously lied to. My bf didn't do anything violent and didn't plan to. We try to tell them our side of the story, but they weren't listening. They kept saying they had other friends on the phone who would show up asap if we didn't do what they said. It was 2 vs 7+. Safer to just swallow our pride and deal with it. They had us grab our keys, and they followed us to the front entrance outside. They told us to get in our car and leave, and that if they saw my bf again they'd jump him. We got in my car and we drove out to the neighborhood nearby. When we found a spot to park, we got in the back and i cried so badly out of anger. I was so frustrated and pissed that my roommates would go so far as to do that. I never bothered them that whole semester. I just didn't want to go drinking or party with them. They weren't nice people, and they were even horrible to each other given that they were 'best friends'. I didn't give in to their pushy demands or follow them around and so they threatened us. Idk why else they started acting rude to me a couple months beforehand. It came from nowhere seemingly, but they were nice for the first few weeks that i knew them. We even all went to the movies together. This was just scary, dangerous, and plain mean. That next morning we went back super super early when they were all passed out, and we finished moving my stuff.I reported the whole thing to the front office at the apartments and they didn't do anything. Despite saying it was against their rules and lease agreements and telling me that I still had a right to remain in the room at the time and to have a guest. I reported it to the campus police as well, and still nothing. I wasn't able to tell them who those guys were, and there wasn't any evidence of anything I could give them. I didn't have a recording, I didn't have a written agreement of my bf being allowed over between me and my roommates. I didn't have anything useful. All i had was the room number, the first names of my old roommates, and a serious craving for revenge. I didn't get my revenge though, or justice of any kind.The rest of the school year i saw them walk by me and they would laugh and snicker and throw the bird my way. On the shuttle, in the hallways, even when i was singing with the choir for a basketball game. They were in the audience and did all they could to grab my attention. I still wish i could punch them all in their ugly faces, but i don't care so badly anymore. It doesn't immediately anger me to think about that night anymore.

Oh, hell yes.Minnesota Public Radio recently ran a series about how rural hospitals are shutting down birth services and other procedures. CBS’s Face the Nation just did a piece this past Sunday about rural hospitals that are shutting down entirely.That’s just one way in which rural areas are being left in the dust for urban areas.It’s not profitable to deliver packages to the ass-end of nowhere, for example. If my in-laws want to order something on Amazon, it’ll get delivered as far as their P.O. Box in town, anywhere from 30–45 minutes travel away depending on road conditions. The Postal Service only goes as far as a turnaround on part of the minimum maintenance road they’re on, five miles away.There’s a reason that the government had to institute infrastructure projects like rural electrification 75–85 years ago and rural broadband today: nobody would do it otherwise.There’s no bus service or other public transit where I grew up, and my high school has half a dozen extra wide parking stalls for tractors.The state’s dumping the entire transportation fund into making the interstates really nice. Not particularly useful when the nearest one to you is thirty miles and your road is literally crumbling into gravel.The kids that can escape to a better life in the cities do. The rest try to keep the family farm running or work at the local factory as long as it’s open (always a worry.) Some of those will die of suicides and overdoses, if the cancer doesn’t get to them first. One of the hazards of working with industrial chemicals all the time.The drugs are coming in from the cities, especially methamphetamine and heroin. That’s not helping anyone. Used to be that folks just drank themselves to death on cheap beer or whiskey, but now it’s easier to kill yourself than ever.The kids don’t want to go to church anymore. Communities are more isolated than they used to be. Neighbors aren’t as friendly. Folks have started taking to locking their doors at night and taking the keys out of the truck.Shopko came into my town and talked the council into giving them a 20-year cheap lease with zero taxes on a piece of property on the edge of town. They immediately bought out the local pharmacy, and the hardware store shut down within a year. Now Shopko is going bankrupt and closing that store.Great.Just what we need: another vacant building, and further to drive to get the things we used to be able to buy locally.Television and national news organizations barely acknowledge the rural consciousness.When television does bother to make a show about rural areas, it’s hyperbole or even mocking. Look at the quaint hillfolk.Parks and Recreation was a popular show, which made fun of small town civics. Look at these people, thinking that their little town matters are all meaningful! Ha, ha!My hometown is often assumed to be like the romanticized town of Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show. Or worse, like Fargo or Deliverance.And the national news just just plain ignores rural America.Hurricane Katrina killed 238 people and did over 100 billion dollars in damage… outside of New Orleans. Did you know that? Do you remember the countless news stories on ABC and NBC nightly news about that? Me neither.The only time we get on the news is when a tornado or some other weather rips through town and kills a dozen people, for a day or two before life goes quietly back to things of national importance, like a Congressman with the last name of Weiner sexting dick pics to women on Twitter.And then there’s the derision and arrogance of the city folk who look down their noses at us all day long. Oh yes, there is.I went off to law school and I can mostly at least sort of look the part with the city folks enough that unless I volunteer the information, they don’t know that I’m one of the people they talk about when they joke about the hillbillies and rednecks and backwater hicks in their own backyards. And they do make those jokes.I thought the idea of flyover country was just some sort of joke until I actually spent some time talking with Democratic leaders from the east coast. They actually do talk about us like that.It’s disheartening the amount of time I have had to spend trying to convince urban and coastal progressives that the people I grew up with are not just bigoted, racist, homophobic, uneducated Republican slaves to Fox News. That we’re not just a lost cause to progressive policies.When I try to talk to urban progressives about learning to speak Ruralese and understanding rural values, do you know what I get? Scoffs. “What values? Like racism, illiteracy, and superstition?”No, Karen. We’d like to feel safe in our homes and actually get ahead from an honest day’s hard work for once. Probably the same as you.When I tell my urban counterparts that my people feel like their way of life is dying, do you know how many of them smile and say, “Good!”Now, I’m not going to pretend that rural ways of life are always idyllic or healthy. There are destructive generational issues that have haunted rural life. Alcoholism isn’t really viewed as a problem so much as kind of the norm. Case races with Bud Light or Coors are part of living here. There are lots of people trapped in abusive, destructive relationships because they got married young and had a couple kids before they really had life figured out. Egalitarianism for women is not awesome in some parts of rural America. Being gay or trans could be a death sentence, though it’s better than it used to be in most parts of rural America now.There is surprisingly less outright racism than city folk expect; it’s typically more of a fear of minorities moving in from the city and bringing crime with them than hostility towards towards them inherently because of their race alone. There’s a lot of dairy farmers around here who speak a surprising amount of Spanish when you consider the stereotype of the rural white guy bitching about English as a national language, because the truth is that the dairy industry can’t survive without undocumented immigrant labor paid under the table and you pick up stuff after a while.There is plenty of hypocrisy and ugly to rural living.But there is also a lot of beautiful to it. There will be a meal train and a card signed by the entire community with whatever cash people could scrape into the hat if someone gets sick or someone dies. Move into a new house and someone will be around shortly with a casserole or hotdish for the oven. We’ll hold benefit nights for a family that lost a house to pick up the slack from the insurance, donate our gently used toys and children’s clothing to a less fortunate local family, or show up in crews with chainsaws and ropes to clean up the trees that come down in a storm. We’ll patch up the roof of the pole shed for the neighbor or rope up the cows that got out through the hole in the fence for each other. We’ll plow or blow each others’ driveways out in the winter, especially if it’s old man Holler who’s like 170 and the crazy fool would probably try do it and kill himself trying if someone didn’t.A farmer in Central Minnesota lately had cancer bad enough that he couldn’t harvest his corn crop, so all the other farmers in the area pitched in, brought their combines over, and brought it in for him.Folks care about each other out here.I was always taught as a kid that we had to look out for each other, because God knows nobody else will.Still think that our backwards ways are all without merit?Instead of understanding rural realities and values, instead of listening and having a legitimate dialogue, my people get lectured to like little children about how immoral we are for not adopting a willy-nilly anything goes attitude and how if we would just let go of everything our entire way of life is centered around and care about, we would be so much better off.How’s that change in society working out for us lately?Many of the folks in my home area are quietly suffering. Their property taxes keep going up and their net income keeps going down. Milk prices keep lagging, as do crop prices and animal prices. Manufacturing is more automated all the time. There isn’t much else for a person to do for a living around where I grew up unless you can leave. Main Street is dying as Big Box comes in and kills off the mom and pops.The poverty is crippling in many cases.Whole towns go down when the industry that held it all up collapses. Go talk to the folks in Lordstown, Ohio about that.So, why don’t they just move, right? I hear this all the time from urban people, progressives and conservatives alike. Just move. Move to a better area, if it’s so bad!Gee, thanks, urbanites! Golly, why didn’t you think about that, Jim? Didja hear that smart fella from Baltimore? Just move.Hey, guess what? There’s a hundred-foot wall around all the areas of opportunity called the “cost of living.” A mortgage on a decent house in my area costs as much as the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in the nearby bigger city. I mean, we’re trying to figure out how to put gas in the car this month, but sure, putting together $2,000 for a security deposit and first month’s rent somewhere ought to be a piece of cake.And for what? To live in a shoebox with a thousand other people? The noise? The pollution? The crime?As the city keeps moving out to the country, it’s not getting better out here. Your drugs keep moving in. The disintegration of the families keeps moving in. The economy isn’t getting better for my people when you bring the city to us.Why move closer to that?It feels like the world is falling apart for my people, more and more, and it’s scary. When these people say their way of life is dying, it’s not hyperbole, and it’s not good.It doesn’t feel like anyone is listening to them, especially not the legislature in the state capitol or Washington. (Is it any wonder when Trump came along, spoke to their pain, and promised that he could fix it that they came out for him in droves?)So, yes. The people I know feel the decline of rural America very acutely, and very painfully. They do feel left behind. And for very good reasons.The rest of you in that 80% urban area dismiss that at your own risk.Thanks for the A2A, David Schwartz.Edit - Mostly Standard Addendum and Disclaimer: read this before you comment.I welcome rational, reasoned debate on the merits with reliable, credible sources.But coming on here and calling me names, pissing and moaning about how biased I am, et cetera and so forth, will result in a swift one-way frogmarch out the airlock. Doing the same to others will result in the same treatment.Essentially, act like an adult and don’t be a dick about it.Next person who turns this into a “yeah, but you voted for Trump and shitty Republicans so you deserve it!” goes out the airlock. No exceptions.I’m a slightly right-leaning Never-Trumper who has been driven out of the Republican Party over the past 10 years or so. Don’t bitch at me about it.A lot of my relatives and acquaintances don’t like it any more than you do, which is the goddamned point of the answer. Progressives that want to bitch about it, learn to speak Ruralese and offer them something better. If you can’t beat the warm piss being sold as lemonade that Republicans are serving up, maybe you have a bigger messaging problem.Attacking the rural folks who have come on here to voice their agreement that this is what they’re experiencing is similarly not okay. Knock it off.Getting pissy with me or others about where the drugs are coming from is a dumb and bad faith cherry picking argument and I’m tiring of it. I’m leaving what’s there, but additional piling on will result in violators looking at the debate from the outside.Getting cute with me about my commenting rules and how my answer doesn’t follow my rules and blah, blah, whine, blah is getting old. Again, ornery enough today to not put up with it. Stay on topic or you’ll get to watch the debate from the outside.If you want to argue and you’re not sure how to not be a dick about it, just post a picture of a cute baby animal instead, all right? Your displeasure and disagreement will be duly noted. Pinkie swear.I’m done with warnings. If you have to consider whether or not you’re over the line, the answer is most likely yes. I’ll just delete your comment and probably block you, and frankly, I won’t lose a minute of sleep over it.Debate responsibly.