If you have this blog in your bookmarks in Firefox or Internet Explorer, and you check it from time to time, DON’T do that. That’s not because I don’t want you to read it, it’s just that there are two better ways to get news from this blog and just about every other blog and
The Court of Appeals decided today cases involving a non-compete, dissolution of a partnership, the public policy exception to the termination of at-will employment, the rules of professional responsibility, and the economic loss rule. Here are quick summaries of these five cases:
Non-Compete. In Medical Staffing Network, Inc. v. Ridgway, the Court of
If you are litigating business cases, or any kind of cases where you might be doing legal research, Firefox is the best internet browser and you should dump Internet Explorer and change to Firefox. Right now.
Why should you do that, especially if it puts you in the minority of internet users? There are probably a lot of reasons, but this post is about only two of them. They are both "add-ons" for Firefox. Add-ons let you customize Firefox.
Jureeka automatically adds a hyperlnk to a court decision or a statutory reference on a web page if it can find it. Jureeka does that by looking to the open law sources like PreCYdent, which is one of a number of ventures putting case law and statutory law in the public domain. Another one is the Public Library of Law, which calls itself "the world’s largest free law library," and another is altlaw.com. These sites have federal decisions and a lot of state court decisions that you would ordinarily have to go to Westlaw or LEXIS to find.
Here’s an example of why this is a useful thing: last month, I wrote a post about a decision from the Middle District of North Carolina which found jurisdiction over a defendant because of its use of metatags on its website. In the post, I referenced a decision to the contrary from the Second Circuit. If you were looking at that post in Firefox, with the Jureeka add-on, you would have seen the Second Circuit case with a hyperlink, looking like this:
You could just click on the hyperlink (it’s not live in this post) and save yourself the trouble of going to Westlaw or LEXIS or whatever electronic service you use for federal decisions. And speaking of those services, the other add-on I really like is Citegenie. This takes care of something I find really annoying in Westlaw, the citation format you get when you copy a quotation from a case. Here’s an example of a quote from a case and the citation generated by Westlaw:Continue Reading Why Firefox Is The Best Internet Browser For Lawyers
All lawyers know, from first year torts class, that if you are hit by a baseball at a baseball game, you are unlikely to have any claim against the operator of the baseball stadium. There’s a well developed body of law to that effect.
Today in Allred v. Capital Area Soccer League, Inc., the North Carolina Court of Appeals held that the rules of the game may be different when it’s a soccer game being played. The Allred case is apparently one of only three cases in the country that deals with injuries suffered by spectators from soccer balls kicked into the stands.
The Plaintiff in Allred was attending a women’s professional soccer game at State Capital Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina. She was sitting in the stands behind one of the goals, and was hit in the head by a ball during warmups, when "many balls were directed towards the nets in a relatively short period of time." Op. at 4.. She suffered "substantial head injuries." Op. at 2.
The trial court granted Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss on Plaintiff’s claim of negligence, but the Court of Appeals reversed. Judge Steelman began the unanimous opinion of the Court by observing that there were no reported cases in North Carolina involving injuries to spectators at soccer games, but that the cases involving baseball games "have been uniformly decided against the spectator, either on the basis that the stadium operator was not negligent or that the spectator assumed the risk of being hit by a baseball." Op. at 5.
The Court’s analysis then turned to two issues: the duty owned by the sports facility operator to the spectator, and whether the Plaintiff had assumed the risk by attending the game.Continue Reading Watch Out For Soccer Balls, They Can Be Dangerous
The North Carolina Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals today in a case involving a claim of negligent misrepresentation over a realtor’s Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listing.
The Plaintiffs had purchased a home thinking it was connected to the city sewer system. That’s what the MLS listing said. That was wrong, the home actually had
The North Carolina Court of Appeals today affirmed the dismissal of a defamation claim against a lawyer and his law firm, giving a broad and expansive interpretation to the absolute privilege given to statements "made in the course of a judicial proceeding."
The claim by the Plaintiff in Jones v. Coward was that a lawyer
Novo Nordisk Pharmaceutical Industries, Inc. v. Carolina Power & Light Co., 2008 NCBC 16 (N.C. Super. Ct. Sept. 15, 2008)(Jolly)
As the North Carolina Business Court framed the issue in its opinion yesterday in Novo Nordisk Pharmaceutical Industries, Inc. v. Carolina Power & Light Co., it was "whether and to what extent a public utility contractually
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ujVCpOv9IZQ%26hl%3Den%26fs%3D1
This is a follow-up to the most read post on this blog. That’s the one about the lawsuit brought by the University of Louisville against Duke University when Duke backed out of its contract to play four football games against the Cardinals. Louisville sought a contractual cancellation fee of $150,000 per cancelled game, but Duke won the case on a Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings.
You can read the earier post here, but a quick synopsis of Kentucky Judge Phillip Shepherd’s decision is that Louisville was not entitled to damages because the contract said that Louisville could not get damages if it was able to replace Duke with teams of "similar stature." The Court observed that at oral argument, Duke . . . persuasively asserted that this is a threshold that could not be any lower." The Court adopted Duke’s argument that any football team playing in former Division 1-A and many in former Division 1-AA were of "similar statute" to Duke, and dismissed the case.
Since then, I’ve been wondering: what exactly did Duke’s lawyers say to Judge Shepherd to so "persuasively assert" that Duke football is so bad?
Well, not only can I fill you in on that, you can watch and see for yourselves. The Court in Franklin County, Kentucky, videotapes some of their hearings, and a video excerpting the highlights of the Louisville v. Duke hearing is at the top of this post. (There’s no criticism of the lawyering here, Duke’s lawyer did a great job, and after all, she won the case for her client.). The video takes a few seconds to get going.
If you don’t want to take the time to watch the video, you can keep reading to see exactly what was said.Continue Reading The Law And Duke Football: The Video
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This post is about three significant business decisions from courts in other jurisdictions. They involve an issue of attorney-client privilege for limited liability companies, whether an LLC member can waive his statutory right to seek dissolution of an LLC, and board duties in a merger context.
First, if there’s litigation between a member-manager of an LLC and
I’m writing this post about the Business Court’s past decisions involving tortious interference with contract because "tortious interference" is one of the most common searches leading readers to this blog.
So, here’s a summary of more than a dozen Business Court decisions which involve that tort, with links to the summaries of the cases on this blog, which
