The lawsuit filed by a Youngsville couple against a homebuilder will move forward in court, a judge has ruled.
Last year, West and Alicia Dixon told KATC that their home ownership dreams turned to nightmares because of mold in their DR Horton home.
They filed suit against the company, one of the nation's largest homebuilders, but DR Horton immediately sought to dismiss their suit - claiming the final sales agreement the couple signed in 2014 required them to participate in arbitration.
On Tuesday, 19th Judicial District Court Judge Donald Johnson rejected that, and allowed the suit to move forward.
A large part of the ruling, which you can read for yourself by scrolling down, concentrates on the legal details of the contracts that the company presented to the Dixons to sign. The critical part of the final contract wasn't initialed by either the Dixons or the Horton rep, and critical sections were rendered in "unreasonably small, excessively and unreasonably light, and unreadable print by Horton," the judge wrote.
Bottom line, the contract is "not legally binding nor enforceable," the court found.
The judge quoted case law; one case found that "mere consent in writing will not automatically make an agreement valid," and another noted that, even with written consent, "obligations arising therefrom may still not be enforceable if the consent has been produced by some vicе."
He also referenced several cases that found contracts unenforceable because the content was illegible, or because of the relative positions of the parties signing the contract. There has to be a "meeting of the minds" or consent among the parties for the contract to be valid, case law has held.
"Because the Dixons are not sophisticated corporate entities such as D.R. Horton.... but rather lay persons, the Court concludes that there is no clear and unmistakable evidence of the parties' intent to delegate issues of arbitrability to an arbitrator," the judge wrote.
The Dixons actually signed two contracts, one in April and one in June 2014. The first one was "illegible" so the second one was signed, but the second one did not contain the proper purchase price of the home, and that made it invalid, the court decided.
The ruling also contains various decisions on testimony and evidence presented during hearings to date.
We reached out to Lance Unglesby, lead attorney for the Dixons' team.
"Having studied this arbitration clause for so many years, I take a lot of pride in the fact that Chief Judge Donald Johnson recognized how one-sided and unfair the arbitration provision is for homeowners," Unglesby said.
We asked how his clients are feeling about the ruling.
"The Dixons feel they're getting closer to having justice for all they've been through," Unglesby said. "The home is in really bad shape. They can't sell it. It needs to be fixed. There are thousands of these homes. All of these homes were built in a way that is defective."
We also reached out to James Alcee Brown of Liskow Lewis, lead attorney for the Horton team, for comment. We'll update this story if we hear from him.
Here's the ruling:
