## Facts

- Juice Entertainment, LLC was formed in 2009 and, over the next two years, successfully produced concerts and other events for relatively small audiences.
- In 2011, Juice entered an agreement with State Fair Event Management (SFEM), the private manager of events at the New Jersey State Fair, to produce a large electronic dance music (EDM) event at the 2011 fair (the state-fair event).
- The agreement required Juice to secure performers by a specified deadline.
- Juice negotiated with several performers, but the negotiations fell through.
- Because it did not secure performers by the deadline, Juice missed the booking requirement in its agreement with SFEM.
- SFEM canceled the agreement, and the state-fair event did not occur.
- Juice and its principals sued multiple defendants, including Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., asserting tortious-interference theories tied to the cancellation and the loss of expected revenues from the planned event.
- Live Nation moved for summary judgment, including on the availability of lost-profits damages claimed from the canceled state-fair event.

## Issues

1. Whether Live Nation was entitled to summary judgment on one or more tortious-interference counts arising from the canceled state-fair event.
2. Whether, under New Jersey law’s reasonable-certainty requirement and the “new business rule,” plaintiffs could seek lost-profits damages for a first-time, large-scale event that never occurred.

## Decision

- The court granted Live Nation’s summary-judgment motion as to Count 1.
- The court denied summary judgment as to Counts 2 and 3, allowing those claims to continue.
- The court ruled that plaintiffs could not pursue lost-profits damages at trial for the canceled state-fair event because projected profits from that untried, large-scale undertaking were too speculative under New Jersey’s new business rule.
- The lost-profits ruling operated as a limitation on recoverable damages, not as a complete dismissal of the remaining interference claims.

## Legal Principles

- Lost profits are recoverable only when proved with reasonable certainty; awards may not rest on speculation.
- New Jersey’s “new business rule” generally bars lost-profit awards for a new or untried venture because expected profits are considered too remote and speculative to satisfy reasonable certainty.
- A plaintiff may be treated as a “new business” for lost-profits purposes even if it has some operating history, when the claimed profits relate to a materially different undertaking without comparable prior performance data (e.g., moving from small events to a first-time large-scale event).
- Eliminating a category of damages (such as lost profits) does not automatically dispose of otherwise viable liability claims that may support other, non-speculative damages.

## Conclusion

In Juice Entertainment, LLC v. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., the District of New Jersey granted summary judgment to Live Nation on one count but allowed two tortious-interference counts to proceed, while barring plaintiffs from seeking lost-profits damages for a canceled, first-time large-scale EDM event at the 2011 New Jersey State Fair because those profits were too speculative under New Jersey’s new business rule and the reasonable-certainty standard.


Juice Entertainment, LLC v. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., 2018 WL 2357748 (2018)