Weekly Edition

Business lit book features two lawyers from Virginia

In 1999, I had occasion to review for Virginia Lawyers Weekly the result of a joint venture of the Litigation Section of the American Bar Association and the West Group entitled, “Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts.”

The editor-in-chief for this project was Robert L. Haig, a trial lawyer in New York City. Included among the authors were two Virginia lawyers, D. Alan Rudlin, who authored the chapter on copyright, and W. Carter Younger, who co-authored the labor law chapter. It was noted then that the chapters were comprehensive in content; accessible; complete with checklists, forms and jury instructions in come instances; set up for smooth departure into research; and user-friendly.

With Haig remaining as editor-in-chief, the venture (which now includes Thomson/West) has published a second edition which improves and enhances the original publication. There are eight volumes in the second edition, up from six in the first edition.
Included in the new chapters are such relevant topics as case evaluation; discovery of electronic information; litigation avoidance and prevention; techniques for expediting and streamlining litigation; litigation technology; litigation management by law firms; litigation management by corporations; civility; director and officer liability; mergers and acquisitions; broker-dealer arbitration; partnerships; commercial defamation and disparagement; commercial real estate; government entity litigation; and e-commerce.

The overall format in the second edition repeats in large part the successful set-up from the first editions. As noted in the 1999 review, the volumes are constructed to walk the user through each phase of litigation in sequence and, as such, they are practice-oriented.

The first chapters (53) are focused on procedural issues; the next few chapters (7) are focused on case management matters; and the final chapters (36) are devoted to those substantive causes of action most often encountered by trial lawyers in business and commercial litigation. As was the case with the earlier edition, the substantive chapters are not meant to be exhaustive treatises on the various subjects, but they do provide a fairly good overview and, in addition to pointing the way to in-depth research, make a serious effort to engage the subjects from the plaintiff’s and defendant’s perspectives.

The new CD-ROM which contains forms and is provided with the second edition has been criticized for its level of adaptability when opened with Microsoft Word.

While the criticism may well be a fair one, nonetheless the multivolume set is user-friendly and exhaustive, and should be seriously considered by trial lawyers as an addition to their departments and libraries.

Michael W. Smith, a past president of the Virginia State Bar and a business litigator, practices with Christian Barton LLP in Richmond.

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