In business litigation, it’s often necessary to determine whether the litigants are shareholders in a corporation. To bring a lawsuit against an officer or director of a corporation for breaching a fiduciary duty owed to the corporation, for example, the plaintiff must be a shareholder and bring the suit derivatively…
No employer likes to see a large number of its employees band together and leave en masse to form a competing business. A large number of employees leaving at once can lead to a loss of institutional knowledge and experience, not to mention customers and revenues. Mass departures hurt morale…
Virginia is considered a “notice pleading” jurisdiction, which means that a complaint need only contain allegations of material facts sufficient to inform a defendant (i.e., put the defendant on notice) of the true nature and character of the plaintiff’s claim. To meet this standard, though, a plaintiff must allege actual…
Virginia recognizes a cause of action against those who tortiously interfere with the contractual expectancies of another. To prove tortious interference with business expectancy under Virginia law, a plaintiff must show (1) the existence of a valid business expectancy; (2) knowledge of the expectancy on the part of the interferor;…
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…
Noncompete agreements are typically found in employment agreements between employers and their employees. But that’s not the only place these clauses are found. Sometimes you’ll have two sophisticated companies of roughly equal bargaining power who, for whatever reason, wish to enter into a binding agreement placing restrictions on the one…
A conspiracy to harm another’s business may be actionable under Virginia’s business-conspiracy statute, which provides for a cause of action where two or more people “combine, associate, agree, mutually undertake or concert together for the purpose of…willfully and maliciously injuring another in his reputation, trade, business or profession by any…
Virginia does recognize a legal cause of action for improper interference with an anticipated business contract. The tort is known as “tortious interference with business expectancy,” “tortious interference with future economic benefit,” “tortious interference with prospective economic advantage,” or some variant of that phrase. It’s what you sue for when…
Not long ago, Serco, Inc., won summary judgment on various claims asserted against it by L-3 Communications Corp. and L-3 Applied Technologies, Inc., including claims for statutory business conspiracy, common law conspiracy, and tortious interference with business expectancy. On appeal to the Fourth Circuit, however, the court found that the…
In Virginia, independent contractors can be held to noncompete agreements to the same extent as regular employees. But beware. A Fairfax County Circuit Court judge decided last month that all bets are off if the “independent contractor” should really have been classified as an employee. Although the Virginia Supreme Court…