Hallmark Institute of Photography, Inc. v. CollegeBound Network, LLC, — F.Supp.2d —-, 2007 WL 3145433 (D. Mass. October 29, 2007).
CollegeBound LLC is an Internet marketing company that gathers “leads” for its customers. These “leads” are people who visit CollegeBound’s websites, express interest in the services provided by CollegeBound’s customers, and provide their contact information. CollegeBound then sells this lead information to its customers on a “cost per lead” basis. The customers then follow up with their own marketing efforts.
One of CollegeBound’s customers was Hallmark Institute of Photography. It signed written agreements with CollegeBound whereby it agreed to pay more than $30 for each lead that CollegeBound provided. When the parties were negotiating the deal, CollegeBound allegedly orally represented that between three and seven percent of the leads would enroll for Hallmark’s photography courses.
Although CollegeBound gathered leads and sent them on to Hallmark, less than one percent of them applied. Hallmark was disappointed in this result, and sued CollegeBound for breach of contract and for fraud and misrepresentation. CollegeBound moved to dismiss, and the court granted the motion.
On the breach of contract claim, the court held that the parol evidence rule precluded it from considering any extrinsic evidence. The alleged representations were made orally, and not included in the written agreement. Although the contract did not contain an “integration clause,” the court found that the agreement was fully integrated, where essentially all the important terms were included, and there was no indication the parties intended there be any additional terms. Since the agreement was not ambiguous, the court could not consider any evidence outside the document’s four corners.
As for the fraud and misrepresentation claims, the court held that CollegeBound’s statements were of a “fundamentally predictive nature,” and “concerned a matter of opinion, estimate or judgment which was not susceptible of actual knowledge at the time of [their] utterance.” For these reasons, the court found that Hallmark could not have reasonably relied on the statements. So the claims failed as a matter of law.