It’s no secret that the Court of Special Appeals has been increasingly overwhelmed with cases, nor is it a secret that the Court would like to see a lot of these cases resolved or otherwise cleaned up before having to spend time on them. Those concerns led to the creation…
In its 2009 decision in Shenker v. Laureate Educ., Inc., 411 Md. 317, the Court of Appeals of Maryland inserted a caveat in the premise that shareholder lawsuits against corporate directors must be pursued as a derivative action on behalf of the corporation itself. By declaring that a corporation’s impending…
Have you obtained a judgment for recovery of money? Lucky you! Is that judgment unsecured? Ouch. Well, at least you have some protection should your opponent decide to appeal: Under the Maryland Rules (and unless the parties agree otherwise), the appellant has to file a supersedeas bond covering the whole…
Governments and businesses know – or at least they should – that there’s a difference between being vicariously liable and being directly negligent. Jurors may not, however, so how carefully should the distinction be explained come time for crafting jury questions? Perhaps not much – according to a new opinion…
We all know the little tricks to stuffing the most content into the allotted number of pages of your appellate brief (currently 50 for the Court of Appeals and 35 for the Court of Special Appeals) – decreasing the line spacing, decreasing the margins, decreasing the kerning, decreasing the height…
As the appellant in the Maryland appellate courts, when should you file your brief? Currently, it’s within 40 days after the clerk notifies you that the court has filed the record. Sounds easy enough, except the current Maryland Rules don’t actually require the clerk to send such a notice. In…
Maryland attorneys are eminently familiar with the State’s Local Government Tort Claims Act (LGTCA), which imposes a limitation on liability for the local government entity of $200,000 for each individual claim ($500,000 aggregate for claims that arise from the same occurrence). This limitation on liability operates to strictly limit damages…
Silverman|Thompson|Slutkin|White real estate litigation attorneys succeeded in obtaining summary judgment on behalf of the private owner of a project-based Section 8 housing project in a breach of lease action pending in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. The case involved a determination of whether projects funded by the Department of…
Civil litigators know that the impending bankruptcy of an opponent is bad news for any lawsuit that’s ongoing or in the works: Bankruptcy operates as an automatic stay of any state-court litigation against the debtor until the bankruptcy gets resolved. Oddly, however, the precise effect of such a stay was…
The Maryland Insurance Administration, or the MIA, is charged with regulating the insurance industry in Maryland. Its responsibilities include issuing licenses to insurance professionals, developing policy, and drafting regulations. The MIA is also charged with investigating alleged violations of Maryland’s laws and regulations governing insurance. As part of this delegated…
Toward the end of last year, I attended a discovery conference in D.C. Throughout the panel discussions of the proposed changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and various electronic discovery resources, I found myself thinking about the practical application to my current cases and future client representation. In…
Like many Eastern states, historically Maryland has not been a large producer of oil and gas. But that could change in the not so distant future. In the West, proponents of “fracking” are anxiously eying the new Hogan government to see what it will do while offshore, the Department of…
Over the law few months, we have been getting calls every week from Internet subscribers who think they’re about to lose their homes, their entire life savings, or in one particular instance, their freedom (one woman was terribly afraid that she and her husband were going to be sent to…
Courts across the country haven’t taken too kindly to insurers using technicalities or blaming their insureds to deny coverage and Maryland is no exception. Legislatures’ displeasure with insurers’ knack for finding devils in details sharpens where insurers deny coverage even though the insured’s mistakes caused no real problems. The Maryland…
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a major guilty plea in line with their goal of curtailing the use of foreign bank accounts by Americans to conceal taxable assets. Credit Suisse bank pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to aid Americans evade taxes by hiding their wealth in…