Alaska Injury Law Blog
The Alaska Supreme Court recently issued an opinion in Asher v. Alkan Shelter, LLC, which is a case involving an employee’s embezzlement of funds from his employer. The Alaska Supreme Court reversed the trial court’s ruling that the employee and his girlfriend were jointly and severally liable to the employer for the stolen funds, holding that AS 09.17.080, Alaska’s allocation of fault statute, required the court to allocate fault and liability between the employee and his girlfriend.
Significantly, the court ruled that the trial court should not simply determine the total damages suffered by the employer and allocate fault for those damages between the employee and his girlfriend. Instead, the court ruled that the trial court should only allocate fault on those damages it found had been caused by both the employee and the girlfriend. The effect of the court’s ruling is that if a defendant is responsible for a part of, but not all of, a plaintiff’s damages, trial courts and juries must separate the plaintiff’s damages into their divisible parts and make separate allocations of fault for each category of damages.