The District Court held that SmartChannel failed to validly terminate the SEO Agreement on 24 March 2023, as it had not cancelled within the contractual cancellation window and the alleged breaches by Area Ten were not established on the evidence. The Court preferred the plaintiff's expert evidence that website traffic increased during the engagement period and found no proven causal nexus between Area Ten's admittedly low-quality PCE content and SmartChannel's alleged revenue losses, with the defendant bearing the onus of proof on those matters. The Court also refused SmartChannel's application to reopen its case after close of evidence to challenge invoice calculations, finding the issue could have been raised earlier and would cause disproportionate prejudice, and held that SmartChannel's misleading or deceptive conduct cross-claim failed because the alleged pre-contractual representations were not shown to be false or to have caused the losses claimed.
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