Business News

Joint and several liability is important in personal injury actions and was created to protect the injured.  Two elements need to exist for joint and several liability to apply: (1) negligent cause of action, and (2) two or more defendants.  Under joint and several liability, each defendant is jointly responsible for all economic damages awarded in favor of the plaintiff, regardless of the percentage of fault found against any particular defendant.  What does this mean and why is it important?

Small business owners know that every penny counts.  Like the good farmer, you want to know that at the end of the season, you have reaped a good harvest.  How do you know if switching to an S corporation status will yield significant benefits at the end of the tax year?
Think about this: You can be “double taxed” if you are now operating as a C corporation.  Your profits, like the good harvest, can shrink since those profits are taxed to the corporation and taxed again to the shareholders when paid out as dividends.

Taking a federal tax deduction for support provided to your favorite charity may now be easier — or more difficult, depending on which provision in a new tax law affects you. Here’s a selected overview of new and existing charitable donation rules. What has changed? In 2006 and 2007, if you’re 70 or older you can make direct transfers from your IRA to qualified charities.

As the Trustee of a trust, you have numerous responsibilities, some of which for various reasons may not receive your fullest attention. For example, if you are a Trustee, it is not uncommon to be confused about or even ignorant of your position’s requirements.  You may not have read the Trust document recently, and instead are relying on your memory of its contents or on advice provided by a lawyer years ago.  In that case, you may actually be operating under false assumptions about the requirements.  With no one looking over your shoulder, it’s easy to grow complacent over the years.

As we all have come to see, interest rates remain steady and the housing inventory is plummeting from its historic high.  That’s the best news for home sellers in months.  It’s a funny thing to me, the market we emerged from where at best 400 properties were on the market across the SCV (vs. 2300 today).  Folks sold homes for top dollar, and then had little inventory to choose from, but they had to pay through the nose at “non-negotiable” prices for whatever could be found (the same went for all buyers, move up sellers or not), was called a “great market.

In past articles, I have written on topics such as arbitration and the weighing of the costs and benefits of including an attorney’s fees provision in a contract.  This article considers the two together. Whenever a business client comes to see me with a dispute involving a written agreement, one of the first things I check for is whether the client agreed to binding contractual arbitration to resolve the dispute.  What I mean by this is an agreement executed in writing by the parties which require some or all of the disputes to be arbitrated as opposed to litigated.