The Court of Appeals faced that rarest of truffles this week:  an outcome-determinative choice of law question.  The Court adhered to its traditional roots and rejected a new test fashioned by the Business Court. At issue in Harco Nat’l Ins. Co. v. Grant Thornton, LLP was an audit of a company providing bail and immigration bonds in North Carolina and other states.  The plaintiff, an insurance company, entered into an agreement with the bonding company on…

We present two items today for the consideration of our loyal readers: 1.  Shameless Plug for Your Votes The good people at Lexis, which hosts our firm’s legal blogs and many others, recently notified us that we have been nominated for consideration as one of Lexis’s Top 25 Business Law Blogs.  If you are a registered member of the LexisNexis Business Law Communities, please feel free to put in a kind word at this link…

An entity can be interested (legally) in the outcome of a lawsuit, or it may simply be interested (in the go-sports-team-from-my-hometown-or-university! sense) in the outcome.  Under a recent Business Court ruling, only the former supports intervention under Rule 24. Time Warner Entertainment Advance / Newhouse Partnership v. Town of Landis involved access to utility poles, a type of dispute committed to the Business Court under 2009 legislation. The North Carolina Association of Electric Cooperatives (“NCAEC”), an organization…

As discovery of electronically-stored information (“ESI”) becomes more prevalent and relevant in litigation, so too does litigation regarding the obligation to preserve ESI.  Last Friday, the Business Court issued two orders reaching opposite results on motions for “non-spoliation” orders, based on significant differences between the scope of the preservation obligations that the plaintiff sought to impose. In Capps v. Blondeau, the Business Court previously ruled that an arbitration clause was unenforceable.  Two defendants appealed that ruling and,…

If you have visited the restroom in an office building in the last five years, chances are you’ve had the opportunity to use Georgia Pacific’s hands-free paper towel dispenser known as “enMotion.”  In a published opinion released yesterday, the Fourth Circuit generally ruled in GP’s favor on trademark infringement, tortious interference, and unfair and deceptive trade practices claims. The enMotion dispenser (pictured here) operates through an electronic motion sensor that dispenses towels without any physical…

Be careful what you request in your complaint, particularly if it’s a request for judicial dissolution.  According to a Court of Appeals opinion this week, you’ll be stuck with that request if your defendant asks for the same thing. In Bradley v. Bradley, a husband-wife team were the shareholders and officers of a legal recruiting firm, Laura Segal & Associates (“LSA”).  When the couple separated, the business basically did too — the wife asserted that the husband…

If you didn’t think a case with a $55 million default judgment could get more interesting, you were wrong.  The Business Court awarded a total of $82 million in damages this week against a company that successfully set aside the lesser default judgment. In Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas v. TradeWinds Airlines, Inc., three airline-related plaintiffs sued a lessor of large airplanes.  The lessor was funded by deep pockets including George Soros, but not…