Vilnis Neilands, Appellant,

This opinion will be unpublished and
may not be cited except as provided by
Minn. Stat. § 480A.08, subd. 3 (2018).

STATE OF MINNESOTA
IN COURT OF APPEALS
A19-1487

Vilnis Neilands,
Appellant,

vs.

Elizabeth Perry,
Respondent.

Filed April 27, 2020
Affirmed
Florey, Judge

Cook County District Court
File No. 16-CV-17-175

Erik F. Hansen, Elizabeth M. Cadem., Burns & Hansen, P.A., Minneapolis, Minnesota (for
appellant)

Scott A. Witty, Leah L. Fisher, Hanft Fride, P.A., Duluth, Minnesota (for respondent)

Considered and decided by Larkin , Presiding Judge; Worke , Judge; and Florey ,
Judge.
U N P U B L I S H E D O P I N I O N
FLOREY, Judge
Appellant challenges the district court’s grant of summary judgment on his unjust -
enrichment claim, arguing that it erred in determining that there was no evidence to support
the damages element. We affirm.

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FACTS
Vilnis Neilands and Elizabeth Perry met in 1992 while they were both residing in
New York. They developed a romantic relationship shortly thereafter and began
cohabiting, but they never got married. The parties dispute how e ach understood their
relationship.
Since before meeting Neilands, Perry operated a business wherein she made and
engraved signs and other craft projects to sell to the public, a business she would later name
“E.R. Perry Signs & Engraving” (the business). In 1996 or 1997, the parties moved to
Grand Marais, Minnesota, and began residing on a plot of undeveloped real property
referred to as “the farm” in this litigation. Perry initially purchased the farm with her own
assets; and while Neilands was included as a joint owner for a time, the parties agreed to
transfer it back to Perry for tax purposes in 2002, and the farm has remained solely in her
name since.
In 2016, the parties’ relationship broke down , and they ceased cohabitating. Over
the period between their moving to Minnesota and the conclusion of their relationship, they
had, in relevant part, (1) acquired the farm and transferred or altered title to it on more than
one occasion; (2) acquired a building in which the business could be operated; (3) caused
some of the land on of the farm to undergo certain developments; (4) had a Quonset
building erected; and (5) grown the business to a considerably larger scale.
The parties vigorously contest many aspects of the causes and effects of these
accomplishments, such as the extent to which either party dedicated his or her own labor
or resources to them, the understanding they had with respect to them, and the way in which

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they were actually done. Each party brought claims against the other, alleging tha t the
other was unjustly enriched by the claimant’s own labor and resources. The procedural
history relevant to appeal concerns Perry’s motion for partial summary judgment. The
district court granted it and dismissed Neilands’s requests for constructive trusts over both
the farm and the business. It did so because it also granted Perry summary judgment on
Neilands’s unjust -enrichment claim, which was the foundation of the constructive -trust
requests. The district court also found that it did not have pe rsonal jurisdiction over the
business, as it was not a party to the action. Neilands requested leave to amend his
complaint to include the business, but the district court denied it, concluding that such an
amendment would be futile given the summary judg ment entered on his prerequisite
unjust-enrichment claim. Neilands appealed.
D E C I S I O N
The court shall grant summary judgment if the movant shows
that there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and the
movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. . . .

A party asserting that there is no genuine issue as to any
material fact must support that assertion by : (1) citing to
particular parts of materials in the record, . . . or (2) showing
that the materials cited do not establish the absence or presence
of a genuine issue for trial, or that an adverse party cannot
produce admissible evidence to support the fact.

Minn. R. Civ. P. 56.01, .03(a). “On review of summary judgment, we view the evidence
in the light most favorable to the party agai nst whom summary judgment was rendered.”
Gunderson v. Harrington, 632 N.W.2d 695, 701 (Minn. 2001). The nonmoving party may
avoid summary judgment by establishing an issue of material fact with “substantial

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evidence;” which includes evidence from which r easonable persons might draw different
conclusions, but excludes mere speculation that lacks any “concrete” evidence. Osborne
v. Twin Town Bowl, Inc. , 749 N.W.2d 367, 371 (Minn. 2008) ( quotations omitted). The
“substantial” in “substantial evidence” refers “to legal sufficiency and not quantum.” DLH,
Inc. v. Russ, 566 N.W.2d 60, 70 (Minn. 1997). “In a typical case, when the material facts
are not in dispute, an appellate court will review the district court’s grant of summary
judgment de novo.” Melrose Gates, LLC v. Moua, 875 N.W.2d 814, 819 (Minn. 2016).
“In order to establish a claim for unjust enrichment, the claimant must show that
another party knowingly received something of value to which he was not entitled, and that
the circumstances are such that it would be unjust for that person to retain the be nefit.”
Schumacher v. Schumacher, 627 N.W.2d 725, 729 (Minn. App. 2001). Additionally, “it
must be shown that a party was unjustly enriched in the sense that the term ‘unjustly’ could
mean illegally or unlawfully,” which has since “been extended to also apply where . . . the
defendants’ conduct in retaining the benefit is morally wrong.” Id. The measure of
recovery for a successful unjust -enrichment claim is generally the extent of the benefit
unjustly retained by the opposing party and not the extent of the claimant’s expenditure or
loss. Anderson v. DeLisle, 352 N.W.2d 794, 796 (Minn. App. 1984), review denied (Minn.
Nov. 8, 1984).
Despite the district court finding there to be a number of issues of fact in this case,
it granted Perry’s motion for summary judgment. It did so on the basis that Neilands failed
to substantiate his claimed damages and that a lack of evidence in the record prevented him
from making such a showing with any specificity. See Wick v. Widdell, 149 N.W.2d 20,

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22 (Minn. 1967) (“In an ordinary civil action the plaintiff has the burden of proving every
essential element of his case, including damages by a fair preponderance of the evidence.”).
Referencing several items in the record, Neilands argues that he has proven the measure of
his damages—at least to an extent sufficient to preclude summary judgment. We agree
with the district court that Neilands cannot sufficiently show his damages on this record.
First, Neilands attempts to establish damages by recounting, from affidavits, the cost
of the many products and services he obtained in furtherance of the farm’s develo pment.
The sum of these, he argues, as well as the value of his own labor, ought to be the
measurement of damages. However, as stated above, it is well -established that recovery
in unjust enrichment is limited to the amount by which the other party was e nriched—not
the amount of the claimant’s loss. Neilands contends that this court’s holding in Anderson
v. DeLisle allows for divergence from this rule where equity so requires. Anderson, 352
N.W.2d 796. Specifically, Neilands argues that the district co urt erred in not considering
his expenditures as damages in light of our language in Anderson that this rule “cannot be
applied mechanically” and our modification of the jury award in that case to match the
claimant’s expenditures. Id. We reject this contorted reading of Anderson.
In Anderson, the jury awarded the plaintiff nearly twice as much as he had expended
to enrich the defendant. Id. at 795. This court reduced the award to the amount of
plaintiff’s expenditures, recognizing that unjust enrichment is an equitable remedy and that
“[e]quity cuts both ways.” Id. at 796. Neilands is correct that the Anderson opinion states
that the enrichment rule of damages “cannot be applied mechanically,” but he fails to take
notice of the remainder of that sent ence: “to situations where the alleged value of

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improvement exceeds their cost.” Id. Here, the issue is not that Neilands has been awarded
so much as to implicate equity concerns; it is that he has not produced evidence to support
a proper measure of dam ages—a necessary element of his claim. See Wick, 149 N.W.2d
at 20.
The only evidence even related to potential benefits to Perry is a 2016 market
analysis of the farm, which showed that the value of the property had increased by a factor
of six since its purchase. We agree with the district court that this too is insufficient to
substantiate the damages element of Nei lands’s unjust-enrichment claim because he has
not presented any evidence to (1) support that his labor and investment was at a ll
responsible for the increase and, if so (2) identify any amount of that increase for which he
was responsible. Any number of factors could have influenced the increased value of the
farm, including the plethora of factors underlying market fluctuations, increases i n the
value of real estate generally, and the investments Perry made herself. With nothing in the
record with which the district court could have even estimated a potential range of
damages, Neilands’s claim that his investments increased the property val ue is no more
than a conclusory assertion. The same is true with respect to the business—Neilands only
provides evidence of his expenditures, not their relation, if any, to Perry’s enrichment.
There is plenty of evidence in the record that Neilands invested in the development
of the farm and business and that Perry, as the owner, has more now than she did at the
time of purchase; but there is nothing that connects those two sets of facts —much less
indicates the degree to which they are causally connected. Neilands had ample opportunity
during discovery to gather any evidence to support the damages element of his claim but

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did not. We therefore affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment and need not
address the issue regarding personal jurisdiction over the business.
Affirmed.