Eric Chase, chair of Bressler’s Franchise practice group who works nationwide with automotive dealer clients was quoted by Crain’s Automotive News, a leading source of news about the global automotive industry. The article discusses the recent court ruling in New York that deemed General Motors’ metric for measuring dealer sales effectiveness unfair.
According to Eric, the impact of the decision should be far-reaching in dealer-termination cases based on sales performance. However, Chase said the ruling did not explicitly answer the overarching question of whether a manufacturer can lawfully use a statewide average to rate dealers’ performance, which he said by definition lumps half of its dealers into the bad column. This decision addressed only whether certain local-market quirks should be considered when measuring dealers against an average. Chase added “It’s an extremely important win…But it still didn’t answer the ultimate question of whether the metric of average is a fair cutoff for a franchisor to make a termination decision.”
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