In this patent and trade-secret dispute between Safe Haven Wildlife Removal and Property Management Experts and Meridian Wildlife Services, the defendant tried to raise the stakes by inserting a number of business torts (including breach of fiduciary duty, tortious interference with contract and business expectancies, and business conspiracy) but the…
Noncompete agreements generally prohibit former employees from joining a competing organization for some specified length of time after the employment relationship ends. Some agreements restrict competitive activity even before the relationship ends. In the absence of such an agreement, many employees might assume that they are free to start competing…
The fiduciary duty owed by corporate officers and directors includes an obligation not to usurp a corporate business opportunity for personal gain but to allow that opportunity to be enjoyed by the corporation, to which it is said to belong. (See Feddeman & Co. v. Langan Assocs., P.C., 260 Va.…
About a year ago, a disgruntled systems engineer for government contractor Federated IT was sentenced to two years in prison for illegally accessing his former employer’s network systems, stealing critical servers and information, and causing a loss valued at over $1.1 million. In a civil lawsuit against his girlfriend and…
A couple of years ago, comedian Kevin Hart teamed up with a Virginia mobile-game developer called Stand Up Digital, Inc., to develop and release a video game called “Gold Ambush” that would feature Hart and his family members as playable characters. Hart licensed his likeness to Stand Up and was…
Earlier this month I wrote about the case of a dentist who had sued a consultant for breach of fiduciary duty and failed. The court in that case found that the allegations were insufficient to establish the existence of an agency relationship, and without such a relationship, the consultant owed…
To state a plausible breach-of-fiduciary-duty claim in Virginia, a plaintiff must allege enough facts to prove (1) the existence of a fiduciary duty, (2) the breach of that duty, and (3) resulting damages. The first element—existence of a fiduciary duty—is often the most difficult to prove. Fiduciary duties can arise…
Derivative actions are a mainstay of modern business litigation. They allow a shareholder of a corporation to enforce a right the corporation has but is wrongfully refusing to enforce. Normally, corporate management would be responsible for deciding whether to pursue litigation against someone, but sometimes it’s the management itself–such as…
When an employee has signed an enforceable non-competition and non-solicitation agreement, he will be prohibited from soliciting the employer’s customers for a certain length of time after the employment relationship ends. In the absence of an express non-competition clause, a former employee is generally free to compete with his former…
Readers may remember Tareq and Michaele Salahi from the national attention they gained in November 2009 when they crashed a White House state dinner in honor of India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh or from their run on the reality show “The Real Housewives of D.C.” The Salahis are no stranger…