Year In Review | Virginia Lawyers Weekly

2012 a retrospective

By Paul Fletcher
Published: December 10, 2012
Tags: Year in Review

If you wanted to pick a theme song for 2012, “The Waiting” by Tom Petty and the Hearbreakers might be at the top of the list. It seems like every time you turned around this year, we all found ourselves waiting for something to happen before doing something else. We waited on the U.S. Supreme [...]

The top news you found in your morning email

By Paul Fletcher
Published: December 10, 2012
Tags: Year in Review

Our Daily Alert email service provides links to the news we report on our website and in our three blogs, as well as items from other news operations throughout Virginia. You clicked on the stories and we listened. Here are your Top 25 Daily Alert items from 2012: 1. Legislators grab judgeships for home turf [...]

Litigation pitfalls and pratfalls

By Deborah Elkins
Published: December 10, 2012
Tags: Attorneys Fees, Civil Procedure, Discovery, Employment Discrimination, Fairfax County Circuit Court, Federal Courts, Law Firms, Legal Malpractice, Personal Injury, Real Estate, Richmond Circuit Court, Sanctions, Social Media, Supreme Court of Virginia News, Year in Review

Lawyers can find plenty of ways to stay out of a courtroom. Instead of the hand-to-hand combat of a trial before judge or jury, they can opt for some form of alternative dispute resolution. But the lure of the courtroom stays strong, for a whole class of litigators and for those who just enjoy stories [...]

Judge choices dominate legal highlights for 2012

By Peter Vieth
Published: December 10, 2012
Tags: General Assembly, Judgeships, Lawyer Discipline, Million-Dollar Verdicts, Rules of Evidence, Virginia State Bar, Year in Review

Judges and judgeships again made headlines in Virginia legal news in 2012, with the General Assembly earning national attention with its rejection of an openly gay candidate for a general district court seat. The leading VLW story was a report that, in a year of austerity, legislators with access to the budget process managed to [...]

2009: The Year in Review

By Paul Fletcher
Published: December 14, 2009
Tags: Year in Review

It was a tough year that most people – and most lawyers and law firms – will be glad to consign to the dustbin of history. According to the University of Virginia law school survey we wrote about just last week, after all the economic turmoil, a lot of people feel like something in law [...]

Looking Back at 2009: Top News Stories

By Alan Cooper
Published: December 14, 2009
Tags: Year in Review

The turmoil that resulted from the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts was the top legal story in Virginia in 2009. The 5-4 decision in June required a special session of the General Assembly and continues to vex judges, legislators, prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys – not to mention the Virginia Department of [...]

Looking Back at 2009: Top Supreme Court Cases

By Deborah Elkins
Published: December 14, 2009
Tags: Supreme Court of Virginia, Year in Review

Virginia’s highest court is in transition. By early 2011, we may see four new justices on the seven-member court, in a little more than three years’ time. The two newest justices, LeRoy F. Millette Jr. from the Court of Appeals in 2008 and S. Bernard Goodwyn from Chesapeake Circuit Court in 2007, joined the Supreme [...]

Looking Back at 2009: Top Daily Alert Items

By Peter Vieth
Published: December 14, 2009
Tags: Year in Review

Virginia lawyers keep track of what’s going on every business day with Virginia Lawyers Weekly’s Daily Alert, an e-mail message that provides links to news and court opinions of interest to the legal community. We regularly watch and note which Alert items generate the most interest. The following are the 20 hottest Daily Alert clicks [...]