When Nick Muntjan got into legal trouble, his father Paul did what fathers do.
He sat in the initial meeting with the law firm and promised to make sure his son’s bills got paid. He asked that all invoices come to his own email. Over the following months, he sent reassuring messages about payment, queried the account balance, and negotiated a fee cap for discovery work—signing each note with “Best Regards, Paul Muntjan.” What he never did was sign a written guaranty.
When $13,528.06 in legal fees went unpaid, the law firm sued him. The North Carolina Supreme Court, in its March 2026 decision in Smith Debnam Narron Drake Saintsing & Myers, LLP v. Muntjan, held that Paul Muntjan’s emails—informal, conversational, never once saying I promise to pay my son’s legal fees —were enough to create a legally binding guaranty of payment. Taken together, they constituted a written memorandum sufficient to satisfy the Statute of Frauds and bind him to his oral guaranty.
Most lenders know the basic rule: a guaranty has to be in writing and signed by the guarantor to be enforceable. That requirement comes from North Carolina’s Statute of Frauds, which has been on the books for centuries specifically to prevent people from being held liable for someone else’s debt based on nothing more than someone’s say-so. The statute exists for good reason—guaranty disputes are fertile ground for conflicting testimony and faulty memories.
What is less commonly understood is that the statute does not require the guaranty agreement itself to be in writing. It only requires that some written memorandum of the agreement exist—signed by the person being charged. The memorandum can be informal. It can consist of multiple documents read together. And crucially, it does not need to contain every term of the agreement, only the essential ones: the debt, the debtor, the guarantor, and the creditor.
That is the rule the North Carolina Supreme Court applied to Paul Muntjan’s emails, and it is the reason he lost. The Court parsed the emails carefully. In the September 2019 message, Paul wrote that “it is important to us to always pay our valued partners quickly for their services rendered” and that “your invoice will be turned around immediately and a check sent upon receipt.” He asked that all future invoices be routed to his email. The Court noted that the words “us” and “our” unmistakably grouped him and Nick together as obligors, and that the promise of prompt payment made little sense unless Paul himself bore responsibility for it.
Later emails reinforced the picture. In December, Paul forwarded a complaint filed against Nick and asked how “we” could best work with the firm going forward. In June, he wrote that “we” might be missing a prior payment. In July, he negotiated a $3,000 cap on discovery fees, then confirmed that discovery “would be the last item we need to deal with.” Throughout, payments were made on his credit card.
None of these emails said, in so many words, that Paul Muntjan was personally guaranteeing his son’s legal bills. Some of the justices would have held that fatal. But the majority disagreed, finding that the emails collectively memorialized the essential terms of the oral guaranty with enough certainty to be enforceable. The father had identified the debt, identified the debtor, identified himself as the party responsible, and identified the creditor. That was enough.
The case is decided on North Carolina law and turns on its particular facts. The Court was explicit that its holding is narrow—a different set of emails, with different language, could come out differently. The dissenting justices made that point forcefully, noting that Paul’s emails were equally consistent with a father who was merely helping to manage his son’s affairs without personally guaranteeing anything. The majority prevailed, but it was not unanimous.
Even so, the case carries practical lessons that extend beyond law firms chasing unpaid legal fees. The first lesson is for creditors who find themselves without a signed guaranty: do not assume all is lost. If someone has been acting like a guarantor—receiving invoices, making payments, negotiating terms, using inclusive language about shared obligations—the written record of that conduct may be enough to satisfy the statute of frauds, even without a formal, signed agreement. Before you write off a claim against a guarantor who never signed on the dotted line, review the email trail.
The second lesson runs the other direction. The case is a reminder that informal communications with your bank’s borrowers and their principals can create or reflect legal obligations in ways that nobody planned. A special assets officer who corresponds with a parent, spouse, or business partner of a borrower—and who uses or receives language suggesting shared responsibility for the debt—may be building an inadvertent record. That record could work for you or against you depending on which side of the dispute you are on.
The third lesson is the one that never gets old: get the guaranty signed. The law firm in Smith Debnam ultimately prevailed, but only after a trial, an appeal, a divided Court of Appeals panel ruling against it, and a Supreme Court decision with two dissenting justices. That is an expensive way to collect $13,000. A signed guaranty at the outset would have made the case trivial. Nothing in this decision changes the value of a properly executed guaranty agreement that identifies the guaranteed debt, names the guarantor, and bears a signature.
Paul Muntjan almost got away with it. The statute of frauds was designed in part to protect people in exactly his position—someone who made an oral promise he later regretted. It did not save him, because his emails said too much. The practical takeaway for lenders is the same as it has always been: paper the deal at the beginning. Courts can sometimes rescue you when you don’t. But sometimes they can’t, and the difference can come down to a single line in an otherwise casual email.
