The VLW Blog

The Fairfax Law Foundation’s Society of Fellows has announced the winners of its first annual Golden Gavel Awards. The Awards were established to recognize the contributions of individuals, organizations and businesses for their leadership and community service. The Golden Gavel Awards dinner will be held at the Country Club of Fairfax on Sept. 20. The [...]

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A Fairfax County prosecutor received a public admonition yesterday from a Virginia State Bar three-judge discipline panel for allegedly withholding evidence about prosecution witnesses. As The Washington Post reports, the judges rejected license suspension for Fairfax County Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Mark Sullivan, but admonished him for allowing two co-defendants to testify they were not offered [...]

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If you beget a child beyond the borders of the commonwealth, you may not be able to get child support through a Virginia court. A Virginia woman whose love affair with a filmmaker living in France left her with a 12-year-old daughter to support cannot sue the film maker for child support in Virginia, the [...]

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Divorce courts deciding custody often look at travel time when they juggle visitation schedules. One Fairfax court got right down to the daily commute, deciding a child should change from a Virginia school to one in Annapolis in order to cut his windshield time. When William Atkins and Debra Piccirillo divorced in 2005, the parties [...]

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A Fairfax Circuit judge has ordered a Northern Virginia lawyer and his client to pay the attorneys’ fees and costs of two defendants they sued in a residential real estate tangle. Total price tag: About $272,000. Judge Jonathan C. Thacher called the litigation “vindictive” and chided the lawyer and client for taking a claim to [...]

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When it comes to pleading adultery, a lawyer can’t use a claim of smoke to ferret out a fire. In a Keeler v. Keeler, a new divorce case from Fairfax, the wife suspected adultery. In her divorce complaint, her lawyer cited the husband’s alleged use of Craigslist to solicit sexual partners and a computer forensic [...]

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Lawyers who asked the Supreme Court of Virginia to order a court clerk to process their court-appointed fee vouchers withdrew their petition for mandamus last week. Matt Greene of Fairfax, one of the lawyers who claimed that more than $50,000 in fees were in arrears for work at the Fairfax County Juvenile & Domestic Relations [...]

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Fairfax Circuit Judge Gaylord L. Finch Jr. wasn’t included on the list of judges to be reelected by the General Assembly on Jan. 22. The Northern Virginia delegation asked the House and Senate Courts committees to hold back certification, pending their review of his record. Domestic relations litigants and a group of parents who opposed [...]

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An executive who said she was defamed during a performance evaluation gets another shot at a jury, in today’s ruling from the Supreme Court of Virginia in Hyland v. Raytheon Technical Services. In March 2007, the high court reversed Cynthia Hyland’s $1.85 million award, saying two of the five allegedly defamatory statements in the executive’s [...]

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Note to self: Don’t swipe a surfboard at the Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach when Virginia’s prosecutors are meeting there. A couple of would-be wave riders apparently tried just that, only to run afoul of Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney (and surfer) Ray Morrogh. We hear that Morrogh was leaving a Thursday afternoon meeting at the [...]

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