.The Florida Third District Court of Appeal tackled an important issue in March 2025 when it decided Pierre’s Caribbean Cuisine LLC v. LeaseFlorida LLC. The case centered on whether a jury trial waiver in a guaranty agreement could bind a tenant when the lease itself did not contain such a waiver provision. The court definitively held that such a waiver applies solely to the guarantor, not to the tenant, who never agreed to relinquish this fundamental right.
The factual backdrop involved LeaseFlorida LLC as landlord entering into separate agreements with Pierre’s Caribbean Cuisine LLC as tenant and with Ananias Pierre, a principal of the tenant company, serving as individual guarantor. While the guaranty agreement included a jury trial waiver provision, the lease agreement contained no such clause. When litigation arose and the tenant demanded a jury trial, the landlord moved to strike this demand, arguing that the guarantor’s waiver should bind the tenant since Pierre was the tenant’s principal. The trial court initially agreed with the landlord’s position and struck the jury demand.
However, the appellate court reversed the decision, holding that contractual obligations, including waivers of constitutional rights like jury trials, require explicit mutual assent from the specific parties to be bound. The court noted that the guaranty agreement was signed only by Pierre in his individual capacity, was not referenced in the lease agreement, and was not incorporated into the lease by any express language. Since the tenant never signed the guaranty agreement and never agreed to waive its jury trial rights, it remained entitled to demand a jury trial. This ruling matters a lot for commercial real estate lawyers – it shows that you can’t assume contract terms will carry over between agreements. If you want a provision to apply, you need to put it directly in each contract where it matters.
The court rejected the landlord’s arguments that the guaranty language somehow incorporated the jury trial waiver into the lease agreement, finding it does not absent express incorporation language. The court also declined to apply the equitable estoppel doctrine, noting that while courts have allowed non-signatories to enforce waivers against signatories in certain circumstances, the reverse situation presented here—where a signatory seeks to enforce a waiver against a non-signatory who never agreed to it—does not warrant estoppel protection.
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