Chance the Rapper has won the last claim in his legal fight with former manager Pat Corcoran, closing the book on a battle that dragged on for nearly six years.
Cook County Circuit Court Judge James E. Hanlon Jr. ruled on Tuesday, October 13, that Corcoran breached his fiduciary duty to Chance in the merchandise business. A fiduciary duty is the legal obligation to put another person's interests ahead of your own and to disclose any money you stand to make from their deals — and the judge agreed with Chance's argument that Corcoran owed him that duty as his manager.
In plain terms, Corcoran got paid twice. Chance paid him a 15% management commission on merchandise, while the vendors Chance bought from were also paying Corcoran commissions that Chance was never told about. Chance's team characterized those hidden vendor payments as kickbacks.
Under the ruling, Corcoran must give up the vendor commissions and forfeit — meaning surrender — the 15% fee he earned on merchandise for the period the ruling covers. The ruling does not put a specific dollar figure on the amounts, but Chance's team says Corcoran is likely to lose as much as $1.5 million in management fees on top of the vendor money — an estimate from Chance's side, not an amount set by the court.
In a detail that stung, Corcoran and his company, Pat the Manager LLC, must also transfer ownership of ChanceRaps.com to Chance within 14 days. The judge found that Corcoran registered the domain in his own name in 2013 and held onto it throughout the entire case. That finding cut against Corcoran's own 2020 lawsuit, in which he claimed he 'built the CTR merchandise operation from scratch,' saying he sourced the products and vendors, acquired the website, and financed the inventory. According to Rolling Stone, the judge concluded that the merchandise business was precisely where Corcoran's conduct cost Chance money.
The dispute dated back to the rapper's rise as an independent artist who famously built a career without a record label, winning Grammys on the back of streaming-only releases. His split with Corcoran — once one of his closest collaborators — played out publicly through lawsuits and countersuits before finally resolving in Chance's favor. The ruling is a reminder that even in the artist-friendly independent era Chance helped pioneer, the fine print of management relationships can still turn into a courtroom war.