Imagine one of your employees, driving a company vehicle, rolls through a stop sign and smashes into another driver.  The other driver was speeding and was dialing a number on her cell phone.  So who is at fault?  And most importantly, who has to pay?

Principal contractors in Maryland can breathe a sigh of relief – the Maryland Workers’ Compensation law does not make them responsible for the injuries that a subcontractor’s employees suffer on an out-of-state jobsite.  Nor do they have to ensure the subcontractor maintains workers’ compensation insurance policies in multiple states.  You may find yourself asking what the big deal is – after all, principal contractors have never had these requirements.  Maryland’s highest court recently decided that a principal contractor was not liable for the workers' compensation benefits of an employee of its subcontractor, when the employee suffered an accidental injury while working on a jobsite in the District of Columbia.  The employee filed a claim for worker’s compensation benefits in Maryland.  The subcontractor had workers' compensation insurance coverage in the District of Columbia but not in Maryland.  The court had to decide whether the principal contractor or Maryland’s Uninsured Employers' Fund would pay the employee’s benefits.  ...

 A recent case made it harder for an unsecured creditor to defend a preference avoidance action in a bankruptcy.  This ruling may be particularly troubling to unsecured creditors in the construction industry, because it involved the potential for payment from bond proceeds.

In a recent controversial opinion that allowed insurers and business owners to breath a huge sigh of relief, Maryland’s highest court upheld the constitutionality of Maryland’s cap on non-economic damages, meaning that a plaintiff’s claim for pain and suffering damages is limited regardless of what a jury awards. In the summer of 2006, a five-year-old boy accidentally drowned in a country club swimming pool in Anne Arundel County.  The boy’s parents sued the swimming pool management company for negligence.  The parents won and the jury awarded them over $4 million for their mental anguish from the death of their child.  Because of Maryland’s law that sets a cap on non-economic damages (pain and suffering, as opposed to medical expenses and lost wages), the trial court reduced the verdict to just over $1 million.  The parents appealed and argued that the statutory cap was unconstitutional. The court rejected the parents’ argument on the basis that it had already decided the same issue years before.  In two...

We live in an era where litigation is an ever-present, and a sometimes overwhelmingly frequent, consequence of doing business. Businesses must be aware of their obligations under the law to prepare for potential litigation on an ongoing basis. The advent of email and other forms of electronic transmission and storage of information increases the need for a reliable electronic and paper document retention plan (that is communicated to all employees); having one can sometimes enhance the chances of efficient and successful litigation and avoid the imposition of court sanctions for failure to preserve records relevant to litigation. In addition, all businesses and their employees must know when, even with a document retention plan, the law triggers a further obligation to retain documents, also known as a "litigation hold."