Recent News

Most people have heard of something called a statute of limitations.  Generally speaking, a statute of limitations is a law which specifies a period of time within which a claim may be brought, before it becomes time barred.  There is no one statute of limitations for all possible claims.  Rather, each specific claim is governed… Read More

When I am defending a client in a civil lawsuit, I often hear a variation of this question: “Can I sue them for suing me?”  This is a typical reaction to being sued, because you may feel angry and offended and want to lash out and punish the other side just for filing a lawsuit… Read More

July 28th, 2022 Attorney Todd Cook presents: Comparing Forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution: Arbitration vs. Mediation. Read More

Welcome to part three of the ongoing series on common contract terms, with articles previously written here and here about indemnification and integration clauses, respectively. The topic for this post shifts to a discussion of severability clauses. Severability clauses, like integration clauses, often reside within the “boilerplate” provisions found regularly in contracts ranging across multiple industries and subjects. In other… Read More

Washington State’s Receivership Act (RCW 7.60 et seq.) can be a powerful tool in a business dispute. However, there is a noticeable dearth of caselaw interpreting the Receivership statute. Therefore, parties are often left to making arguments based on principles of statutory interpretation, the legislative policies underlying the Act, or analogizing to federal bankruptcy law.… Read More

In my most recent blog post, I discussed indemnification, one of many regularly seen provisions found in numerous types of contracts notwithstanding their diversity of subject matter. While parties may or may not negotiate indemnification provisions into their agreement, so-called “boilerplate” clauses find home in contracts with even greater frequency, and concerningly, often without due… Read More

Your company may have its own lawyer on staff, or even a full legal department. While having a lawyer on staff can be invaluable as a ready source of daily advice and review, when it comes to litigation, outside counsel is a must. Litigation is absorbing and time consuming, and if your in-house counsel is… Read More

“Aggressive litigation” is typically synonymous with “expensive litigation.” But not always. JP. Diener of our firm presented an excellent webinar describing the civil litigation process in general: https://beresfordlaw.com/webinar-youve-been-sued-now-what-introducing-the-litigation-process/. Once the plaintiff files the Complaint, the defendant typically files an Answer, and perhaps other claims of its own. From there, the standard next steps is Discovery –… Read More

Our world is full of contracts:  construction contracts, consulting contracts, retail contracts, employment contracts, settlement agreements, and, well, writing the list down on a stack of papers might result in a stack so thick that it would cover the distance from our Earth to the Moon. Despite covering an unimaginably wide variety of subject matter,… Read More