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An important first question for any defendant who is served with a new lawsuit is whether the court has personal jurisdiction. Essentially, personal jurisdiction gives a court the ability to exercise its authority over a defendant. For a court to have personal jurisdiction, there must be a sufficient connection between the case and the state where the lawsuit is pending. For example, a court will typically have personal jurisdiction if a defendant is an individual who is a resident of… Read More

Quite a bit, in fact, if you’ve got a calculator handy. As we head towards opening day, there has been quite a bit of buzz about Major League Baseball’s new rules, including the newly expanded bases. The new bases aren’t quite the extra-large pizza boxes you use in your Wednesday night softball league, but they have been expanded from fifteen inches square to eighteen inches square. In addition to providing three more inches between a sliding player’s studs and the… Read More

To draw upon another gambling metaphor, the towing industry’s already loaded dice are about to be weighted even more in that industry’s favor due to two bills pending in the 2023 session of the Virginia General Assembly that, at the time of this writing, appear destined for passage into law: SB 978 and HB 2392. As the adage “forewarned is forearmed” is nowhere truer than when dealing with those towing operators who take unfair advantage of trucking companies, cargo owners,… Read More

It always seems to happen on an otherwise easy Tuesday afternoon; you’re finishing up the paperwork for the day when you get a phone call: one of your employees working in another state has hurt himself or been injured on the job. What happens now? If you don’t already cover this in your employee handbook, then the first thing that should happen is to make sure the employee gets medical attention. Make sure you get some sort of report of… Read More

As you pull into a free space, ready for some rest from the day’s long ride, millions of data points about your drive are being uploaded and saved. Your speed when you thought nobody was looking, captured. The sudden brake you applied when a vehicle cut you off out of nowhere, also captured. You cannot operate a truck without being fully immersed in telematics and data management (also known as fleet tracking), tools that are easily viewed as only making… Read More

Starting up and running a trucking company is no easy task. There are all the typical headaches that come with operating any business such as the paperwork, insurance, and staffing. Then, there are the ones specific to trucking, such as: Department of Transportation and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration registration requirements; fuel tax requirements; State and Federal compliance regulations compliance; and a mountain of others. So, now that the Environmental Protection Agency has finalized new regulations aimed at reducing emissions… Read More

It has been a long day, the last two hours of which you spent angling for a parking spot, hustling through the grocery store for necessities, waiting in line to check out, then hustling toward the door to load everything into your car and hustle home. Then you see it—another line at the exit, where one-by-one shoppers are showing their receipt and verifying that the contents of their cart comport with the receipt. You cannot take one more delay and… Read More

Look around you on any given day and you will see words and symbols that represent businesses large and small. Every time you see the distinctive swoosh, you know that the products come from Nike; and when you see that wave, you know it’s Coca-Cola. Even if consumers cannot identify the company behind the good or service, they know that it is the same company and can rely on what they know about those goods or services. Words and symbols… Read More