How to vacate a default judgement in New York is something every potential litigant should know. It is a topic filled with cautionary tales of second chances, heartache and redemption, as we have talked about in the past. It also demonstrates the importance of thinking outside the box when you…
Sometimes you learn something new from unexpected places. Sometimes you have to challenge your assumptions if you want to have any hope of solving an otherwise intractable problem. Sometimes, just because common knowledge is widely accepted, does not mean that it should be. A recent appeal I was working on…
A contract for the sale of goods: one business, or merchant, buys a part from another. They agree on quantity, price, and delivery. The Seller sends the Buyer a purchase order and delivers the goods, and the Buyer pays. It all sounds easy, but as we previously said, a lot…
Trial lawyers are problem solvers. That is what they have to do and what their clients expect them to do. The biggest problem they face is how to persuade a jury. After all, the last time a trial went completely as planned was probably the first time one ever did.…
Vacating a default judgement in New York, as we have previously discussed, is not always easy. Often it is up to the discretion of the trial court. There are certain times, however, when the defaulting party may not need a reasonable excuse for failing to appear, as long as it…
We’ve spent a decent amount of time discussing how lawyers try to persuade people. That, after all, really is their job: to convince a decision maker, be it a judge, jury, or appellate court, that their client is right and should have won, should live to fight another day, or…
Summary judgement motions in New York are strange things. When used in the right way they can bring long, arduous litigation to an end merely by submitting papers to the court, without the need to call messy witnesses, susceptible to skillful cross-examination, to trial to be judged by a jury.…
How do you prepare a witness to testify at trial? That seems like a fair question; but what’s the best way to do it? It seems like there are as many different answers as there are people to answer it. Everyone knows that when you have a trial, you need…
It is not always easy to obtain a default judgement in New York. It is harder, still, to vacate one, especially when the defaulting party has a history of missing deadlines or otherwise not doing what the court wants. A recent case from the Third Department, Wood v. Tuttle, 106…
We’ve spent a lot of time this past summer talking about how important negotiations are to businesses and individuals alike, and how various negotiation strategies work together to produce desired, and sometimes unintended, results. This time, we’re coming back to one useful strategy in particular, which is known by the…