Craig v. Anyon

Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York

Decided February 20, 1925

Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York · decided 1925-02-20

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“The contract of audit was not one merely to discover if inadvertent clerical errors had been made in the bookkeeping, but was one of protection of the plaintiffs’ firm from their own failure to find any error in their books of account. This contract the defendants failed to perform. Admitting the neglect of the plaintiffs to discover the embezzlement and falsification of the accounts through an examination of the books on their own part, the defendants’ work in pursuance of the contract, owing to the manner in which it was performed, failed to save plaintiffs from the consequences of such failure and neglect, which was the very subject of the contract.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including Shapiro v. Glekel

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1925-02-20

How this case has been cited

Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently December 2009

3 district · 8 state decisions

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Clarke, P. J.

¶1(dissenting):

¶2I dissent from the affirmance of so much of the judgment as sets, aside the verdict of the jury assessing the damages at $1,177,805.26. The contract of audit was not one merely to discover if inadvertent clerical errors had been made in the bookkeeping, but was one of protection of the plaintiffs’ firm from their own failure to find any error in their books of account. This contract the defendants failed to perform. Admitting the neglect of the plaintiffs to *68discover the embezzlement and falsification of the accounts through an examination, of the books on their own part, the defendants’ work in pursuance of the contract, owing to the manner in which it was performed, failed to save plaintiffs from the consequences of such failure and neglect, which was the very subject of the contract.

¶3Judgment and order affirmed, without costs to either party as against the other.