Michigan Supreme Court Weighs a Second COVID-Era Wedding Venue Contract Case Disposed by Kalamazoo County Courts Without a Trial

Fourteen lawsuits, one trial, one unanimous jury verdict for the venue. The Supreme Court has already sent one of the others back once — and the Court of Appeals then reversed the Kalamazoo courts for deciding it without hearing evidence.

The Verdict and the Gap

On March 14, 2023, a Kalamazoo County jury unanimously cleared Loft 310 and Ryan Reedy, as member manager of Entertainment Managers LLC, on every count in the only one of fourteen COVID-era contract lawsuits against the company that reached trial. Court records show ten of the fourteen were dismissed with prejudice.

WWMT, MLive, and WMUK reported the original complaints. None reported that the majority were dismissed with prejudice, none reported the jury verdict, and none reported the appellate rulings that followed in companion cases. The Michigan Supreme Court now has the last unresolved matter — Joseph v. Entertainment Managers LLC — pending on application for leave to appeal. Stallworth v. Entertainment Managers LLC reached the same Court once before; it was remanded, and the Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the Kalamazoo courts on remand. That sequence is why this record is being set out now.

The last of fourteen COVID-era lawsuits against a Kalamazoo wedding venue is now before the Michigan Supreme Court on an application for leave to appeal. It arrived there without ever having been tried. Judgment was entered against the venue by default in Kalamazoo County's 8th District Court. The 9th Circuit Court affirmed. On November 25, 2025 the Court of Appeals affirmed as well, 2–1.

The judge who dissented would have thrown the judgment out. "The record shows," she wrote, "that defendant had very strong, if not absolute, defenses." The venue had raised them, and the district court, she wrote, "applied an improper legal framework" by never reaching them.

No court has ruled on those defenses. The Supreme Court has not said what it will do with the case.

It is the second of these lawsuits to reach that Court, and the path of the first is the reason this one is worth watching.

In Stallworth, the 8th District Court entered a $25,000 judgment on the pleadings. That phrase is worth slowing down for, because it is the whole of what happened. No witness testified. No document was admitted into evidence. Nobody was cross-examined. The judge read the couple's written complaint and the venue's written answer and decided the case from those two pieces of paper.

In practice, the court took one side's account as established and proceeded as though the other side's denials were not in the file.

The 9th Circuit Court affirmed. And on May 12, 2023 the Court of Appeals refused to hear the appeal in a single sentence:

"The application for leave to appeal is DENIED for lack of merit in the grounds presented."

Three rulings. All three left the judgment standing.

The Michigan Supreme Court then intervened and sent the case back. A different Court of Appeals panel took it up — and on August 29, 2024 reversed unanimously, holding that both Kalamazoo courts had erred. They ignored the venue's responsive pleadings, treated attachments to the pleadings as evidence, made findings of fact, weighed conflicting facts, and decided the merits on a motion that permits none of it. The circuit court had also reviewed the case under the wrong standard entirely.

The grounds that lacked merit in May 2023 were the grounds the case was reversed on in August 2024.

That is the record the second case now enters, and the parallel is what the venue's application rests on. In Stallworth, the Court of Appeals left a Kalamazoo judgment standing until the Supreme Court required it to look again — and it then reversed, unanimously, on the ground that the courts below had decided a contract dispute without hearing any evidence. In Joseph, the Court of Appeals has again left a Kalamazoo judgment standing, over a dissent saying the defenses may be absolute and were never reached.

What the Supreme Court makes of that is the open question.

What the thirteen lawsuits before it produced is a record that has never been set out in one place.

Those lawsuits arose out of the same collision: event rental and service contracts signed in 2019, and Michigan executive orders issued in 2020 that made the events as contracted inconvenient to hold — restricted in size, in seating, in service — but, for all but a handful of dates, still possible. Nobody caused the collision. The cases were about who absorbed it.

Only one of the fourteen was ever tried. On March 14, 2023, a Kalamazoo County jury returned a unanimous verdict for Entertainment Managers LLC — the company behind the Loft 310 and Skydeck venues — on every count.

What happened to the other thirteen is the more interesting record. Ten were dismissed with prejudice. Of the three that produced a decision against the company, one was decided on the pleadings without any hearing, one in private arbitration outside the courts, and one by default before any defense was considered.

Across the whole group, one case was decided by a jury that heard the evidence, one by a private arbitrator, and the two remaining ones by courts that entered judgment without any evidentiary hearing at all.

The record at a glance

What the orders actually required

In March 2020, Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued a series of executive orders under the Emergency Powers of the Governor Act and the Emergency Management Act. From March 24 to June 1, 2020, Michigan was under a full stay-at-home order with public gatherings limited to ten people. Capacity limits, distancing and mask requirements persisted into 2021. In October 2020 the Michigan Supreme Court held the Emergency Powers of the Governor Act unconstitutional, but restrictions continued under Department of Health and Human Services epidemic orders through June 2021.

The orders bound venues and guests alike. A business that hosted a wedding in violation of them risked enforcement action, and for a stretch of weeks in 2020 no lawful path to holding one existed at all.

Outside those weeks, though, the events could go ahead. Smaller, distanced, masked, and nothing like what anyone had pictured in 2019 — but they could be held, and most were.

That distinction carried legal weight. A contract rendered impossible to perform can be rescinded; one rendered less pleasant to perform generally cannot. The dispute was never really about whether the venue could perform. It was about who bore the cost of a state order that neither side asked for, and whether a couple who declined the restricted version of their wedding was entitled to the money the venue had already spent producing it.

The contracts

The figures in this section are reported by Entertainment Managers LLC and have not been independently verified. The contract terms are documented in court filings.

The agreements specified non-refundable progress payments for services rendered more than twelve months before the event date, rather than refundable deposits — a distinction at issue in every case. The company's model depended on booking a limited number of peak dates a season, sold a year or more in advance, with a majority of each event's cost incurred before the event date through staffing, multi-venue leases, equipment and vendor commitments.

The company states that every affected couple was given the same two options: hold the event on its original date under the restrictions then in force, or reschedule on full credit within two years, including peak Saturday dates available at short notice — terms more generous than the partial credit the contracts required. Only a small number of events fell inside the weeks when gatherings were barred outright and so could not be held at all; for the rest, both options were open. The company reports that most clients took one or the other, and that their events were held.

Powers v. Entertainment Managers: the case that was tried

According to court filings, the Powers booked three venues in September 2019 for an August 21, 2020 wedding and paid approximately $24,000. The contracts characterized the payments as non-refundable progress payments; the couple characterized them as deposits.

In May 2022, WWMT aired an I-Team segment in which reporter Michael Krafcik interviewed Kristyn Powers, who described the dispute: "It was all ripped away, it was all emotionally draining." Their attorney, Phillip Hamilton, called it "a pattern of conduct."

The company subpoenaed Krafcik for the March 2023 trial. Court records show WWMT retained Butzel Long to block his testimony. He did not testify.

The case was tried in Kalamazoo County Circuit Court in March 2023. Both sides put on evidence. On March 14, the jury returned a verdict for the company on every count.

It is the only one of the fourteen in which a jury heard the evidence and said who was right.

Stallworth v. Entertainment Managers: reversed for deciding without hearing

Stallworth v. Entertainment Managers LLC never reached a trial, and that turned out to be the issue on appeal.

The Stallworths moved for summary disposition under MCR 2.116(C)(9) — failure to state a valid defense. That motion is decided on the pleadings alone. No evidence, no testimony, no findings of fact.

It is meant to be nearly impossible to win. The test is whether the defendant's pleadings are "so clearly untenable that as a matter of law no factual development could possibly deny the plaintiff's right to recovery" — not whether the defendant is likely to lose, but whether there is nothing there at all, such that no amount of evidence could change the outcome. A defendant who simply denies the allegations clears that bar, because the denial itself creates the dispute a trial exists to resolve. The Court of Appeals said so directly:

"when a defendant categorically denies a material allegation, it is a valid defense that could deny a plaintiff's right to recovery, and summary disposition under MCR 2.116(C)(9) is improper"

The venue had denied the allegations. On the rule's own terms the motion should have failed where it started.

Kalamazoo County's 8th District Court granted it instead, and awarded $25,000. The 9th Circuit Court affirmed.

The venue asked the Court of Appeals to review that. On May 12, 2023, a panel of Mark T. Boonstra, P.J., with Jane E. Markey and Christopher P. Yates, refused, in an order one sentence long: "The application for leave to appeal is DENIED for lack of merit in the grounds presented."

The Michigan Supreme Court disagreed. It remanded the case, and the Court of Appeals took it up as on leave granted. On August 29, 2024 an entirely different panel — Brock A. Swartzle, P.J., with Kirsten Frank Kelly and Adrienne N. Young — unanimously reversed.

Both courts had misread the rule in the way described above — treating a categorical denial as though it were not a defense. The circuit court had compounded it by reviewing the case under the wrong standard altogether:

"the circuit court erred because the standard or review for a motion for summary disposition is de novo, not clear error or an abuse of discretion"

The holding is a list of things the courts below were not permitted to do:

"Because it was error for the district court and circuit court to ignore Entertainment Managers, LLC's responsive pleadings, make factual determinations, weigh conflicting facts, and decide the Stallworths' claims on the merits by considering evidence attached to the pleadings, we reverse."

Note what the panel did not say. It did not say the wrong person had found the facts. It said facts had been found where none could lawfully be found at all — on a motion decided from the pleadings, with no evidence, no testimony and no hearing. A judge is entitled to find facts at a bench trial. There was no trial.

The panel reversed and remanded for further proceedings and did not retain jurisdiction.

It is worth restating what that sequence amounts to. A district judge, a circuit judge, and three Court of Appeals judges had each looked at this case and left the judgment in place. Five judges, fifteen months, and no evidentiary hearing at any point. The correction came only because the Supreme Court required the Court of Appeals to look a second time, with different judges.

Clancy v. Entertainment Managers: decided outside the courts, on a hearing no one can read

Clancy v. Entertainment Managers LLC never reached a jury because the contract sent disputes to arbitration. That same clause also required that the arbitration "include a written record of the arbitration hearing."

The hearing was held on February 24, 2021, under the American Arbitration Association's expedited commercial rules. The arbitrator found the company had breached the contract, rejected the conversion claim, and awarded a refund plus fees and costs. The trial court confirmed the award and entered judgment of $78,273.13. On February 2, 2023 the Court of Appeals affirmed in all respects, including the fee award.

A factfinder did hear evidence in this case and did find against the company, and that distinguishes Clancy from Stallworth and Joseph. But an arbitrator is not a court. She is chosen by contract, sits in private, and issues an award that judges review only for whether she exceeded her powers. No court examined whether the company had actually breached anything, because on appeal that question was never open.

What the company challenged was not the result but the absence of any record of how it was reached. The contract required a written record of the hearing. None was ever produced.

The two sides describe the run-up differently. The company says the arbitrator refused its requests to have the hearing recorded; the Court of Appeals described her pre-hearing order as summarizing AAA Rule 28, which puts the cost and arrangement of a stenographer on whichever party wants one. Either way, opening the hearing itself, she changed course on the record:

"What I've decided to do today is I am going to record this proceeding. … If anyone wants to retain a stenographer to make a transcript of that, I will make the — the audio available. The full audio. … So, it's going to be recorded in its entirety. Okay, Mr. Reedy? I saw in the — in the contract it said that — you know, an agreement of the parties to make a record, and I want you to feel like what's happening here today is — is transparent and will be recorded."

She recorded the hearing and sent the file to both sides. Afterward she withdrew it. In the Court of Appeals' own summary of her email, she had "not listened to the recording and could not confirm its completeness or lack of technical glitches," and "not being a court reporter prevented her opining on the limitations and accuracies of the recording," so she "left it to the parties to determine whether the Zoom recording would be the official record." The parties did not agree — the company's filings state that the plaintiffs objected to certifying the recording as official. By then the hearing was over, and a stenographer cannot be sent back to a hearing that has already happened.

Both reviewing courts treated the missing record as the company's own doing. The circuit judge said the company "apparently presumed that those proceedings would … have an official recording," attributed the objection to inexperience, and called it "Monday morning quarterbacking." The Court of Appeals held that the arbitrator "did not disallow an official recording of the arbitration hearing or prevent defendant from arranging a stenographic recording of the proceeding," and that the company "simply failed to arrange for the creation of a record in accordance with the governing rules." The opinion also recites that the company's first lawyer had waived the written-record requirement, and that Reedy retracted the waiver when he took over. The company's position is that the waiver never took effect at all, because AAA required any waiver in writing by November 20, 2020 and nothing in the AAA file shows one was filed.

Neither court had read the hearing transcript when it wrote any of that, because no transcript existed. The recording was not transcribed until 2023, after the Court of Appeals ruled. The company then filed it with the Michigan Supreme Court, in an application for leave to appeal that told that court the opinion "contains numerous misstatements of the record and, frankly, appears to completely disregard the evidence cited by Defendant," and argued the award had been procured through "fraud, collusion and undue means."

What the company says that record would have shown goes to the merits, not only the procedure. Its filings argue the award turned on a single clause read by itself — Paragraph 3 of the cancellation section, which gave the venue the option to cancel if the venue became inoperable — when Michigan law requires a contract to be read as a whole, giving effect to every provision, avoiding any reading that leaves part of it meaningless, and harmonizing terms that appear to conflict. Read that way, the company argues, the clause that governed was Paragraph 1, covering cancellation by the customer: the venue offered to modify the contract rather than cancel it, the couple rejected the offer and cancelled the booking themselves, and under Paragraph 1 no refund was owed.

The Court of Appeals declined to reach that argument, holding it had not been preserved in the courts below. The company's answer is that it was argued at the arbitration hearing itself, and it quotes both sides doing so from the transcript — including opposing counsel's opening statement, which framed the case as coming "down to one question. What does that cancellation pro- -- policy provide?" That transcript was not before the Court of Appeals when it held the question unpreserved.

None of it changed the outcome. The Supreme Court did not take the case, and the judgment was paid and satisfied in April 2024.

Clancy is the largest judgment in the group and the one most often described as a court loss. It is also the one case where a factfinder did hear the evidence — and the only account of what she heard is a recording she declined to vouch for, which no reviewing court read before deciding both that its absence was the company's fault and that the argument it contains had never been made.

Joseph v. Entertainment Managers: three courts, three unanswered questions

Joseph v. Entertainment Managers LLC was decided on a procedural default, and it is the reason there is still something pending.

James Joseph filed suit in March 2022 in Kalamazoo County's 8th District Court — the same court whose disposition of Stallworth the Court of Appeals would later reverse for deciding a wedding venue dispute without hearing evidence.

What produced the default was a calendaring error by the company's lawyer, not by the company. In the Court of Appeals' later words, "the cause of defendant's failure to answer the complaint appears to be that defense counsel failed to properly calendar the answer's due date after requesting an extension." Counsel negotiated a two-week extension to March 29, 2022, did not file by it, and filed the answer on April 8 — seven days late, and before the default was served on the company on April 11.

A default judgment of $11,548 was entered on June 15, 2022. The company moved to set it aside. The district court refused, and its stated reason was that intent did not matter:

"I frankly just don't find that that's good cause. It's not a matter of intent. The Court Rules are the Court Rules. Yeah, sometimes they — somebody doesn't do something like calendaring something, forgetting about something, and it comes back to bite 'em, but I'm kind of a stickler for following the Court Rules."

The circuit court affirmed. That judge said on the record that he would have handled the matter differently but considered himself bound to defer.

On November 25, 2025 the Court of Appeals — Cameron, P.J., with Redford and Garrett, JJ. — affirmed, 2–1. The company lost that appeal, but the majority did not defend how the case had been handled below. It found the district court's reasoning "faulty in two regards": intent can be relevant to good cause, and a default by definition follows from a failure to comply with the rules, so treating non-compliance as disqualifying would leave almost no default that could ever be set aside. It accepted that the lapse was "unknowing and unintentional" and that the company "did not completely fail to answer the complaint." It affirmed regardless, on two grounds: that the result still fell within the range of principled outcomes, and that the company had not preserved a meritorious defense to every count. On the lawyer's mistake it applied a rule with nothing to do with the case — "generally, an attorney's negligence is imputed to the client and is not a basis for setting aside a default judgment."

Judge Garrett dissented. Beyond the passage quoted at the top of this article, her opinion records that the standing objection was not raised late or in passing: it "was a defense that defendant asserted in its affirmative defenses filed with its answer to the complaint," was argued again at the hearing on the motion to set aside, and was supported by a verified statement from Ryan Reedy, the company's member manager, in the form MCR 2.603(D)(1) requires. She also recorded Reedy's sworn account that the event was rescheduled twice and that the bride and groom then chose "for personal reasons" not to hold it at all.

She would have vacated the district court's order and remanded for reconsideration under the proper framework.

The defenses the company says were never reached are documented in its own filings, and it raises three questions it says no court has answered. Its complaint-stage position is that the plaintiff pleaded he had signed Contract #1354619, while the copy of that contract attached to his own complaint carries two signatures — his daughter's and his son-in-law's. The payments, totaling $11,388, came from the bride's mother. And the January 18, 2021 rescheduling addendum, which states that it supersedes any prior agreement, provides in capital letters that the client "AGREES TO NOT REQUEST ARBITRATION OR FILE A LAWSUIT for any reason related to the original contract or rescheduled event dates."

The company frames the result as a trap with no exit: if the plaintiff did not sign the contract, he had no standing to sue on it; if he did, its own terms barred the suit he filed. Its application records the same answer from every level below — district court: did not address; circuit court: did not address; Court of Appeals: did not address.

The Michigan courts' case search lists the matter as MSC #169695, pending on application. An application for leave asks the Supreme Court to take the case; the Court has not indicated what it will do with it. The company is asking for the procedural relief the Supreme Court granted in Stallworth — a remand to the Court of Appeals, which then reversed. That is precedent for the request, not a forecast of the outcome.

What the record shows

Fourteen cases arose from the same contracts and the same restrictions. Ten were dismissed with prejudice. Of the four that produced a decision, one was an arbitrator's award that no court reviewed on the merits, and one was a default judgment entered without any adjudication of the merits at all. Neither involved a finding about what the company did or failed to do.

That leaves the two occasions on which a court engaged the facts.

One was a trial. On March 14, 2023 a Kalamazoo County jury returned a unanimous verdict for the company on every count. The other was Stallworth, the only case in which a court weighed the facts against the company — and the Court of Appeals reversed it unanimously, holding that the courts below had ignored the company's responsive pleadings, made factual determinations, weighed conflicting facts, and decided the merits on a motion that permits none of that.

One trial, one unanimous verdict for the company. One court that weighed the facts against it, unanimously reversed for doing so.

The documents

Every factual claim in this article rests on one of the records below. Opinions published by the Michigan Courts are linked directly. Records marked on file are public court documents that Michigan Courts does not publish online; copies are held on this site and provided on request.

Ten further cases were dismissed with prejudice. Their case numbers are listed in the body.

Corrections

If a statement on this page is wrong, send the sentence and the document that contradicts it to [email protected]. Corrections are made to the page and recorded in the table below.

Reuse

Quote from this page with attribution and a link to https://ryanreedykalamazoo.com/. The court records it relies on are public documents and belong to no one.

About the author