LJN Newsletters

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an imagesome hard phrase, sound and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them and the cause is half won.-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A plurality of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an arbitrator must decide whether class action arbitration in a consumer action is authorized. Green Tree Financial Corp. v. Bazzle, 123 S.Ct. 2402, (June 23, 2003). Four Justices concluded that whether or not the contracts forbid class arbitration is a disputed issue of contract interpretation and that such a dispute must be decided by an arbitrator. Justice Stevens concurred in the judgment.

Your ethics questions answered by the expert.

Recent decisions of importance to your practice.

When employees lose their jobs, bitterness may breed revenge - revenge that goes well beyond the pilfering of pens on the way out. Disgruntled former employees have been known to defame the company to its clients, offer inside information to competitors, and initiate frivolous litigation, all at great cost to their former employers. But there is another problem that may be on the rise: spam, the Internet's version of junk mail.

Recent decisions of importance to your practice.

If a Nassau County judge has his way, people who are in arrears on their spousal maintenance payments will face much tougher sanctions.

In the high-conflict divorce, try as it may, a court has little to offer minor children caught in Mom and Dad's crossfire. Regrettably, in many, if not most, instances, the more resources directed toward high conflict divorces, the more opportunity for escalating the conflict, unintended though it may be. One of the reasons for this entrenching of positions seems to be the identification of a specific role with its concomitant stance for everyone involved.