A litigant can serve a defendant in Turkey with a lawsuit via Facebook, Linkedin, and e-mail, according to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.  It is often very hard to serve parties with lawsuits — especially if they live out of the country, their real identity is unknown, or they are ducking service.  Since a lawsuit cannot start until service, this is a huge issue. The case is Whoiswhere, Inc. v.

Here is a List of Likely New ABC Laws in Virginia for 2014 (All the following bills have passed the House & Senate.  The Governor must sign them for them to actually become law on July 1, 2014.) SB 596: Alcoholic beverage control; state and local license taxes on certain brewery licensees. Imposes a state license tax of $350 and a local license tax of $250 for breweries that manufacture no more than 500 barrels

Under Virginia law, service of process should be perfected on defendants within one-year of the date a plaintiff files a lawsuit.  A plaintiff’s failure to timely serve often leads to dismissal of the plaintiff’s case with prejudice.  In a recent case, a plaintiff’s former employee waited more than one year to serve her former employers with service of process in her harassment lawsuit, and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia dismissed

On February 27, 2014, the Virginia Supreme Court strengthened intentional interference claims by holding that their statute of limitations period is 5-years long, and that they can support a business conspiracy cause of action.  Before this ruling, many had argued that the statute of limitations was only 2-years long based on Virginia’s distinction between “personal claims” and “property claims”.  Finding that the right to enforce the performance of a contract and to benefit from advantageous business relationships

Yes, a company can be held liable for encouraging another business to fire an employee unless it has a legitimate reason for doing so.  If the employee is an “at will” employee, as most employees are, then the employee must show that the company intentionally interfered with his or her employment using “improper methods” to cause his or her termination.  Because “improper methods” need not be unlawful, but need only violate an established standard of