A new federal private cause of action to protect trade secrets appears imminent. Since North Carolina already allows private parties to bring a civil action to protect their trade secrets, we compare the two statutes and answer several practical questions related...
By Bob Meynardie, Business & Construction Trial Lawyer As the Defense of Trade Secrets Act (“DTSA”) makes its way through Congress with bilateral support and the endorsement of the President, it is worthwhile to examine the statute with closer scrutiny. The...
In Beverage Systems of the Carolinas, LLC v. Associated Beverage Repair, LLC, 2016 WL 1084117 (N.C. Supreme Court Mar. 18, 2016), the North Carolina Supreme Court reiterated the adoption of the “‘strict blue pencil’ doctrine under which a court cannot...
Here is an interesting lecture suggesting that legal fees in the U.K. be fixed for small to medium-sized disputes. Download the lecture paper here. Establishing set prices across the board for various stages of litigation has numerous obvious problems but hiring...
At Meynardie & Nanney, we price our services in a variety of ways but encourage our clients to consider the benefits of fixed fee value based billing. Since the mid-1970s, legal services have been typically priced in one of two...
Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying that “Necessity never made a good bargain!” In his wonderful book, Practical Negotiating, Tom Gosselin contends that “In negotiating, power is a function of alternatives.” Gosselin is right, of course, and hopefully a discussion...
A trade secret is business or technical information that is not generally known and not readily ascertainable through independent development or reverse engineering as long as the owner takes reasonable steps to protect the secrecy. 1. Does North Carolina protect...
In Maurer v. Maurer, 2013 NCBC 44, 2013 WL ________, the North Carolina Business Court revisited the question of when a minority shareholder has an individual right to maintain an action against the controlling majority for a breach of fiduciary...
In spite of an acknowledged preference for interest-based “principled” negotiation, I acknowledged in my previous post that every civil mediation eventually becomes a positional battle. This is largely because virtually every civil litigation is resolved based upon an exchange of...
One of the primary tenets of Roger Fisher and William Ury’s book “Getting to Yes” is that negotiations should focus on interests not positions, i.e., avoid positional bargaining. Positional bargaining takes place when each side takes a position, argues for...