A judge has ruled in favor of Forest Lawn Mortuary and Forest Lawn Memorial Park Association, which contended that a dispute over the alleged misplacement of a woman’s burial marker that caused her son to visit the wrong gravesite for four years belongs in arbitration rather than the courts.
The man’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit alleges fraud, breach of contract, negligence and negligent infliction of emotional distress. On Monday, Judge Colin Leis ruled that all of those claims come under the arbitration clause of the man’s September 2021 purchase and sale agreement.
The man’s attorneys argued that the arbitration agreement was unfairly weighted toward Forest Lawn because it requires a California Supreme Court Justice to be the arbitrator, that both sides must share arbitration costs and pay their own attorneys’ fees and that the arbitration award is final, binding and can’t be appealed.
The judge found that the arbitration agreement was fair to the plaintiff.
“Requiring each party to bear their own costs or having a California Supreme Court Justice arbitrate doesn’t make the agreement one-sided in favor of defendants,” Leis wrote. “Plaintiff is not required to unfairly bear defendants’ costs of arbitration or lose his rights to pursue his claims. Further, there are no facts to indicate that defendants have obtained an unfair advantage over plaintiff in arbitration.”
Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Vice President Vicky Franco submitted a sworn declaration in support of the motion to compel arbitration.
“Plaintiff provided a handwritten signature affirmatively agreeing to all terms and conditions of the agreement, including the arbitration clause,” Franco said.
According to the suit filed last May 29, the plaintiff bought two burial plots in September 2008 and four years later asked that his parents release the two burial spots in order to allow the family to have six such contiguous plots. The man’s mother died in July 2021 of the coronavirus and she was buried the next month in one of the plots, the suit states.
The plaintiff bought a monument for his mother’s burial site in September of that year. But he and his family did not immediately know that the headstone was installed on the wrong burial site, causing them to visit his mother at the wrong location until April of last year, when his father died. At that time a Forest Lawn representative told him that although his mother was buried in the correct plot, her headstone was installed elsewhere, according to the suit.
The monument was moved to the correct site, but the mistake had caused the plaintiff to suffer significant emotional distress, including shock, grief and ongoing mental anguish from having grieved and visited the wrong site for his mother, the suit states.
“But for the passing of plaintiff’s father and the viewing service, plaintiff would have continued visiting the incorrect gravesite, unaware of the defendant’s error,” according to the suit.
The judge scheduled a post-arbitration status conference for Dec. 8.