Friend Hudak Harris

Does your company use form service agreements, purchase contracts, or online terms to conduct its business with customers? If so, you should review those documents immediately to make sure you are compliant with the new Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 (CRFA), which makes it unlawful in many cases to use your “standard terms” to control what your customer says about you, your products, or services.

Ben Byrd’s article Dissenters’ Rights: Litigating “Fair Value” was published in the April 2017 Issue of The Litigator. Click Here for Full Article published by the Atlanta Bar Association.

You buy insurance to protect your business (or you, personally) from claims—to hire a lawyer to defend you and to pay damages, if any, for claims covered by your policy. A claim arises. You notify your insurer and believe the claim will be handled. Then, you receive a letter from your insurer, indicating the insurer is investigating the claim and will hire a lawyer to defend you—but it is reserving its right to change its mind—meaning that it can decide later to stop paying the lawyer or to refuse to pay the claim. You have received a “Reservation of Rights” letter (“ROR” letter). Click Here for the full article.

Both of our litigators, Mike Reeves and Ben Byrd, have been recognized as Georgia Super Lawyers for 2017. Their primary area of practice is Business Litigation. Mike has received this recognition many times. This year marks the first time Ben Byrd has been included in the list of Super Lawyers. He was included among Georgia Rising Stars in 2014.

There is a general feeling among transactional lawyers that corporate shareholders are becoming more and more likely to assert their right to “dissent” from a corporate transaction and liquidate their shares. While it is hard to prove or disprove whether this feeling is accurate, it is nevertheless useful to understand the nature of the right to dissent and to examine some of the issues these claims present in litigation.