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The mail comes in like any other day and you sit down to review. Bills, retail advertisements, a bizarre campaign announcement from the local knucklehead running for city council. Keep, toss, burn. Then your heart sinks. A letter from a law office from some county in the state you forgot even existed. You take a deep breath and open it with a sense of unease. That is when you see that your business is being sued due to an accident… Read More

Countless legal scholars have said their peace on this subject since it was established in the Virginia common law by a case called Baskett v. Banks, 45 S.E.2d 173 (Va. 1947). Virginia is one of a bare handful of states that enforce this rule, which to residents of other states can seem rather barbaric in its implementation. The rule plainly stated is that no one can recover from a defendant for injuries which they themselves negligently contributed to causing. To… Read More

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published their final rule reclassifying the northern long eared bat as an endangered species back on November 30, 2022, with an original effective date of January 30, 2023. This classification is pursuant to the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The US Fish and Wildlife service is able to make this determination when a species satisfies any one of five factors: (A) The present or threatened destruction, modification, or curtailment of its habitat or range; (B)… Read More

As you read this, it’s highly likely you have either been in a crash or soon will be. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMSCA) reported that in 2020, of the approximately 415,000 police-reported crashes involving large trucks, 4,444 (1 percent) of them were fatal crashes and 101,000 (24 percent) of them were crashes with injuries. The FMCSA also found that about 71 percent of these accidents were caused by distracted drivers. While these numbers alone are cause for concern,… Read More

Before this week’s article starts in earnest, we are going to have a quick quiz. So go grab your old CRT monitor and Star Trek: Nemesis movie poster, because we are going to play Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. See if you can tell which of these cases are real…and which are works of fantasy. Answers and an explanation of why you should care are below. In Illinois, an attorney managed to sue himself when he filed suit on behalf… Read More

Let’s say you just got served with a new complaint from a customer who alleges that they were hurt while on the premises of your business. An important first question in analyzing that lawsuit is whether it was filed in a jurisdiction that applies principles of contributory negligence or comparative negligence. Contributory negligence and comparative negligence are both doctrines that courts use to determine liability in personal injury cases. However, the similarities between the two doctrines end there, and which… Read More

In what has become commonplace following tractor-trailer crashes on Virginia’s highways involving heavy-duty towing and recovery services performed at the behest of the police, soon after the incident the trucking company receives an invoice from the towing company accompanied by a copy of the Virginia Bureau of Insurance’s (the “Bureau”) August 19, 2020 Administrative Letter number 202005 (the “Letter). As discussed in more detail below, the Letter purports to instruct insurance companies on what the insurance provided under their policies… Read More

“Lost time is never found again,” an insightful quote by Benjamin Franklin, apparently no longer applies in post-COVID Virginia, since the Virginia Court of Appeals ruled that time lost during the pandemic shutdown of the courts can be added back to the Statute of Limitations deadlines for all claims. The Virginia Supreme Court has authority to suspend Statutes of Limitations during a judicial emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic created just such an emergency when courts were ordered to close for an… Read More