North Carolina Lawyers Weekly

The families of two 20 year-olds killed in a Carolina Beach motel fire have been awarded $1.45 million, including $358,000 in punitives, in a New Hanover Superior Court jury trial held late last month. The consolidated cases are Vassallo v ...

Should North Carolina lawyers be required to take a five hour CLE course on professionalism? That question was put to the state’s lawyers at a March 22 public hearing held by the State Bar Professionalism committee. While the substance of ...

Lawyers may face another bar exam the next time they go to a three-hour CLE ethics course. The reason: CLE providers are showing more creativity in their ethics seminars. And the State Bar is encouraging that trend by proposing more ...

Courts and lawyers are being blamed by auto insurance companies for recent hikes in premium rates, while in the General Assembly a bill has been introduced which would negate a Supreme Court ruling that has been singled out for criticism. ...

Expert witnesses are playing an increasingly bigger role in civil trials in North Carolina, and the trend worries some lawyers. Some lawyers say expert assistance at trial is needed more than ever in a litigation environment that is becoming increasingly ...

Lawyers Weekly asked attorneys to identify the latest developments in the use of expert witnesses. Here are some of the trends they’re seeing: Pre-trial uses. Experts are taking increasingly active roles in pre-trial proceedings. For example, in a 1990 auto ...

Lawyers say the latest Appeals Court ruling on separation agreements has departed from a string of recent decisions in its treatment of integration clauses. In a March 19 ruling, the court said even though a 1975 Mecklenburg County separation agreement ...

General Electric Corp. has dropped a four-year bid to stop a small California rival from servicing its high-technology CT scanners and x-ray machines in hospitals across North Carolina, under the terms of a settlement reached earlier this month in a ...

Constitutional Amendment Must Still Pass House And Win Voter Approval A proposed constitutional amendment allowing the appointment of appellate judges has cleared a major hurdle in the General Assembly. Last Tuesday, the state Senate passed two bills that would, if ...

Lawyers and trial judges are giving high marks to a pilot project of recording Superior Court trials on videotape, but no such praise is coming from the Court of Appeals. On March 19, the court issued an opinion criticizing the ...