The VLW Blog

Keeping track of someone else’s federal litigation used to require sending someone to the courthouse every so often to see if anything had been filed. Nowadays, PACER allows monitoring of a case from your desktop.
As if that were not easy enough, the clerk’s office at the Western District of Virginia has gone one better. You [...]

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A judge has upheld a jury verdict rejecting claims that the design of a child car seat led to devastating brain injury for a five-year-old girl.
While Abingdon federal Judge James P. Jones denied the girl’s motion for a new trial, he increased an award of attorneys’ fees to her lawyers based on discovery misconduct by [...]

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A Roanoke federal judge has ordered the Pittsylvania County supervisors to halt the routine use of Christian prayers to open their meetings.
U.S. District Judge Michael F. Urbanski held Friday that none of the arguments in favor of the county board’s prayer policy “has any merit.”
Concluding that a citizen who challenged the prayers was likely to [...]

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Roanoke lawyer Robert S. Ballou has been selected as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Western District of Virginia to replace Michael Urbanski, who was recently elevated to the district court bench.
Ballou is a partner with the Roanoke firm of Johnson, Ayers & Matthews. He served for eight years on the Virginia State Bar’s Special [...]

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Yesterday a Harrisonburg U.S. District Court approved a $9.95 million settlement in a consumer protection class action against Bank of America under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
U.S. District Court Samuel G. Wilson also approved over $1.8 million in attorney’s fees and costs to the attorneys for the plaintiff class, led by Newport News [...]

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Danville U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser has ordered a new trial for a Martinsville contractor’s claims of racial discrimination, based in part on post-trial evidence that undermined testimony about the company’s damages. The decision undoes a jury’s $3.17-million award against the Danville housing authority in February.
At trial, the owner of the plaintiff grading contractor testified [...]

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U.S. District Judge James Jones minced no words denying lawyer John Flannery’s claim that the judge had secret meetings with prosecutors in the Paul Thomson cocaine case.  “Mr. Flannery’s assertion is outrageously false and unfounded,” Jones wrote in an order Thursday.
Flannery – who is defending the Winchester lawyer accused of buying cocaine from a client [...]

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Complaints are plentiful about the 35-year-old Richard H. Poff Federal Building in Roanoke, but workers at the federal courts are not looking forward to a planned $51-million renovation project.
At a Thursday hearing, Congressional critics grilled a General Services Agency official about whether the project was improvidently planned.
Court Clerk Julia Dudley had a different perspective. Once [...]

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A federal judge has denied a motion to dismiss civil claims against a police officer involved in a Saltville incident that started with a speeding ticket and ended with a whole family going to jail.
U.S. District Judge James P. Jones ruled the case can proceed against the officer who arrested Larry Jackson for refusing an [...]

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Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, reports no movement in his effort to derail a $51-million renovation project at the federal building in Roanoke, headquarters of the Western District federal courts.
Goodlatte, who has criticized the project as wasteful and ill-planned, told Roanoke lawyers he met recently with two of the federal judges who work at the Poff [...]

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