What is Quantum Meruit?

What is Quantum Meruit?

It's a Latin phrase. It means as much as he deserves. In law, we use it quite a bit, actually. It's in my contract for every personal injury case I sign up. It's often used by lawyers, and it basically means that the law implies that there's a value in someone's labor, even absent a contract.

I'll give you one quick example.

I was representing a laborer who had a verbal contract to repair someone's bathroom and they just drag it out and drag it out and never paid. The guy spent a lot of his own money and a whole lot of time on it. And as an alternative, saying that we had a contract to do this, we just pled in the alternative, Quantum Meruit, meaning to the judge that, look, there's an implied contract here that you have to pay someone for what they're worth.