Opinion
No 00 C 1242
December 26, 2001
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
In this ongoing pleading war we are faced once again with a potpourri of claims by the plaintiff, this time in the guise of affirmative defenses and prayers for relief with respect to a counterclaim. Defendants move to strike and for sanctions.
The counterclaim is simple enough. It alleges that plaintiff was a participant in a profitsharing and savings plan (the Plan). When she left, her interest in the Plan was $187,573.21, consisting of a 401(k) component of $55,246 and a profitsharing component of $132,327.21. When her Interest was rolled over into an IRA, at her request, the Plan manager Inadvertently transferred to the IRA $187,573.21 plus $55,246, a total of $242,819.21. That is, it paid $55,246 twice, and the individual defendants, not as individuals but as fiduciaries/trustees of the Plan, sue to get back the $55,246 mistakenly paid. Plaintiff does not disagree with that. Rather, she claims that the Plan never told her that if she rolled over her interest prior to December 31, 2000 (the rollover apparently was on August 31, 2000), she would not be credited with any profits for the year 2000. If she had been told, she would have delayed the rollover until the end of the year. Thus, she claims, she is entitled to her share of the year 2000 profits, which could be as much as $55,246 and should be set off against that amount.
The defendants move to strike for four reasons: (1) Plaintiff is just wrong. She had the Plan documents, which expressly stated that profits for a given year would not be included if the participant's interests ended prior to the end of the year. But that gets to the merits, and we are not there yet. (2) Fraud is not stated with particularity, which is probably so (and we have great difficulty in understanding how this could be considered a fraud issue). (3) The circumstances are not such that any recovery by the Plan could be offset against any individual liability of the defendants, which would appear to be so, although the year 2000 profits claim could possibly be offset against any Plan recovery. (4) The string of concepts set forth in paragraph 15 of plaintiff's Answer and Affirmative Defenses are not properly pled, are not applicable here, or both — and we agree.
We strike paragraph 15. Rather than further refining the pleadings, we think it better to let these remarks stand as properly defining the dispute with respect to the counterclaim. We do not impose sanctions, but we again caution plaintiff that her introduction of clutter is inappropriate and unfair to both the defendants and the court.