Legal Articles, Lawsuit & Dispute

Online divorce mediation has several advantages over in-person meetings: it is much more convenient, it facilitates collaborating on documents, it can ease the intensity of emotions, and it gives couples a wider choice of mediators.

Researched law review article written by GEOFFREY C. HAZARD, JR.; JOHN L. GEDID; STEPHEN SOWLE. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3312739?seq=1

You or your loved one has been the victim of abuse or neglect in a nursing home, assisted living facility, or by an aide from a Home Health Agency, with important Covid19 updates included.

Brief history of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act

After you have been denied benefits, you must first appeal before you can file a lawsuit.

“Weaponizing” capital call and dilution provisions can be an effective sharp elbow tactic in business divorce situations, but practitioners should be wary of the risks that come with it.

In a perfect world, groups of potential business partners would sit down before they started their new ventures to hash out the details of their relationship. They would work in close consultation with one or more attorneys to produce detailed subscription, operating and loan agreements documenting their arrangements and clearly delineating responsibilities. In the real world, the birth of closely-held businesses is sometimes far messier. There are a variety of ways to prove or disprove that a person is an equity holder in the absence of membership certificates, stock ledgers or written operating agreements. A perennial favorite, however, is using an entity’s tax returns, specifically, the Schedule K-1.

Some attorneys treat defending a deposition as an opportunity to be a jerk. Speaking objections, witness coaching and bogus instructions not to answer are all arrows in the quiver of the “Rambo” litigator. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, their state equivalents and the rules of professional conduct generally prohibit this conduct. The Federal Rules, for example, expressly authorize district courts to impose sanctions for this type of behavior. Indeed, since Rule 30 was amended in 1993 to add an express prohibition on this conduct, federal courts throughout the country have demonstrated a willingness to crack down on these tactics.

Little mistakes; big consequences. The possibility of catastrophic consequences from the inadvertent disclosure of confidential or privileged documents makes litigators cringe. The proliferation of large e-discovery productions that make manual review unfeasible increases the risks of a misstep.

Confidentiality agreements have become a ubiquitous feature of commercial litigation. This is due, in part, to the expansion of e-discovery and the exchange of ever-increasing numbers of documents. Pre-production review of the thousands or tens of thousands of emails involved in the average commercial case create significant challenges, both in terms of cost to the client and the tight discovery deadlines frequently imposed by courts. A confidentiality agreement, embodied in a stipulated order, can be a convenient way to expedite initial production of documents. It can reduce concerns about the risks of inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information potentially allowing pre-production review to proceed more quickly. The frequent use of these agreements and their benefits can lead to complacency among counsel. Many agreements are lightly negotiated and quickly implemented early in the litigation without full consideration of their potential impact on the attorney-client relationship and the discovery process. They are worth a thoughtful approach.