Enmark v. KC Community Care, LLC (Sept. 25, 2024, B333022) __ Cal.App.5th __ [2014 WL 4290290]
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS) authorizes a conservator to be appointed “for up to one year for a person [who is] gravely disabled as a result of a mental disorder and unable or unwilling to accept voluntary treatment.” Lisa Enmark’s father was appointed as her conservator. When Lisa moved into a nursing facility, her father signed two arbitration agreements with the facility as her representative. After Lisa died, her parents sued the facility’s owners and operators, asserting both successor and individual claims. The trial court denied the facility’s petition to compel arbitration, finding no evidence of the father’s authority to bind Lisa and her heirs to arbitration. The facility appealed.
The Court of Appeal affirmed. The court applied general contract principles to determine whether an agency relationship existed between Lisa and her father, and concluded that Lisa’s father lacked both actual and ostensible authority to sign arbitration agreements on her behalf. Actual agency was lacking because Lisa never authorized her father to act as her agent, and she had no ability to control him. Regarding ostensible agency, the court held that, although the conservatorship agreement gave Lisa’s father apparent authority to place her in the nursing facility and to make “health care decisions” on her behalf, his execution of the arbitration agreements was not a “health care decision” that bound Lisa, her heirs, or his successor claims to arbitration. The court reasoned that the agreements neither accomplished health care objectives nor empowered Lisa’s father to enter into arbitration contracts on Lisa’s behalf. The court further held that Lisa’s parents had never agreed to arbitrate their wrongful death claims. Finally, the court rejected the facility’s estoppel theory, explaining that the “law places the risk on persons who deal with agents to ‘ “ascertain[ ] the scope of [the agent’s] powers” ’ [citation]; thus, any unfairness in the arbitration agreement being unenforceable against plaintiff[s] lies at defendants’ own doorstep.”
