Say you are filing an Answer to a Complaint. NC Rule of Civil Procedure 8(c) lists a host of affirmative defenses you might raise. They are:
accord and satisfaction, arbitration and award, assumption of risk, contributory negligence, discharge in bankruptcy, duress, estoppel, failure of consideration, fraud, illegality, injury by fellow servant, laches, license, payment,
Let’s say that you’ve tried a case, you have lost on a few of your claims, but you won a couple of claims and have gotten a judgment for damages against the defendant for $25,000. You’ve billed your client $1,162,895 for your services and your mixed success. And you have a statutory basis for recovering
The lawsuit filed by the Atlantic Coast Conference against the University of Maryland continues to percolate in the North Carolina Business Court. But the University will have to proceed without its chosen attorneys, as the Court last week refused to admit them on a pro hac vice basis. The decision came in an Order in
Construction lawyers in North Carolina can breathe a sigh of relief. On Friday of last week, the Business Court ruled that the service of on-line service provider Lienguard in preparing claims of lien constitutes the unauthorized practice of law.
You most likely have never heard of Lienguard. It says on its website that it files
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Legalzoom may be a step closer to overcoming the NC State Bar’s assertion that its online legal document service constitutes the unauthorized practice of law (UPL), following yesterday’s ruling in LegalZoom, Inc. v. North Carolina State Bar, 2014 NCBC 9. Or it may be only a few questions away from a ruling that would
Section 6-21.5 of the North Carolina General Statutes is the closest thing the State has to "loser pays." It allows for the award of attorneys’ fees to a prevailing party "if the court finds that there was a complete absence of a justiciable issue of either law or fact raised by the losing
Just because an expert says something is so doesn’t mean that it is. That’s the lesson of Judge Gale’s ruling last week in Carter v. Clements Walker, 2014 NCBC 1. He rejected the evidentiary value of an expert’s report stating that Plaintiff’s damages were $33 million, saying that it was insufficient to create a
How much of an ownership interest does a parent have to have in a subsidiary for the attorney-client privilege to extend to communications between the susidiary and the lawyer for the parent company?
Judge Gale pondered that question in SCR-Tech v. Evonik Energy Services LLC, 2013 NCBC 42, and wrote on a clean slate
It’s been nearly ten years since the North Carolina Supreme Court decided a case involving the attorney-client privilege. That case was In re Miller, 357 N.C. 316, 584 S.E.2d 772 (2003), which raised the question whether the privilege survives the death of the client. (It does.)
That case, which involved a criminal investigation, raised
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Maybe you’ve wondered whether a claim for legal malpractice can be assigned. Maybe you haven’t. But yesterday, the North Carolina Court of Appeals answered that question. In Revolutionary Concepts, Inc. v. Clements Walker PLLC, the Court held that "malpractice claims are not assignable in North Carolina." Op. at 10.
Why not? A cascade of