Virginia Lawyers Weekly VA Lawyers Weekly

Challenges to drug dog searches are as common as the canines themselves. In a case of first impression, the Supreme Court of Virginia today lays down the law for admissibility of evidence obtained as a result of an alert by ...

Tagged with: Criminal Search & Seizure Supreme Court of Virginia

And the winner in the latest round between Chesterfield County Circuit Clerk Judy Worthington and Chesterfield Chief Judge Michael C. Allen is… Allen. This morning the Supreme Court of Virginia entered a terse one-page order denying Worthington’s requests for a ...

Tagged with: Attorneys Fees

A law firm avoids liability on a claim of tortious interference with contract rights today because the plaintiff business failed to allege that the law firm intended to cause the alleged harm. The ruling in DurretteBradshaw, P.C. v. MRC Consulting, ...

Tagged with: Contract Law Firms Supreme Court of Virginia Tort

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 ...

Tagged with: Defamation Million-Dollar Verdicts Supreme Court of Virginia

The plaintiffs’ bar is the winner today in a case where the defense sought to force a plaintiff to elect between a personal injury claim and a wrongful death claim for the estate of a man who died after acquiring ...

Tagged with: Personal Injury Supreme Court of Virginia Wrongful Death

The Supreme Court of Virginia today outlawed the use of the “unavoidable accident” jury instruction in personal injury trials. Writing for a unanimous court in Hancock-Underwood v. Knight, Justice Donald W. Lemons said, “While in the past we have permitted ...

Tagged with: Personal Injury

A handful of sympathetic lawyers in Salem and Roanoke have managed to save the day for three Peruvian college students stuck without jobs in Virginia while on an exchange program. As reported by The Roanoke Times,  attorney Correy Diviney took ...

Judges and aspiring judges are still smarting over the General Assembly’s treatment last year of two members of the Court of Appeals up for re-election, according to a veteran of that court. The 2008 legislative foot-dragging on re-election of Judge ...

Tagged with: General Assembly Judgeships Virginia Court of Appeals

While the Justice Department and a private attorney celebrate a $1.4 billion settlement for Eli Lilly’s misbranding of the drug Zyprexa, the ACLU is throwing down a challenge to the secrecy provisions of the law that made it possible. The ...

Tagged with: First Amendment Fraud

If you look in the right column of the VLW Blog, you’ll notice that we’ve added a new category: “Virginia Law Blogs.” Last week, Virginia Lawyers Weekly ran an article about legal blogs. We listed a few “blawgs” from around the commonwealth ...

Tagged with: Virginia Lawyers Weekly