April 17, 2018
ROBERT B. SPAWN reports on a recent unpublished decision from the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division.
A recent New Jersey case involved a Plaintiff who went into cardiac arrest during an endoscopic procedure in which Defendants served as the anesthesiologists. Because Defendants were not able to effectively restore Plaintiff's heart rate for eleven minutes, Plaintiff alleged that Defendants were negligent, and that this negligence caused serious and permanent cognitive damage. The lower court denied Plaintiff's motion for a re-trial in the aftermath of a jury trial, and Plaintiff appealed.
First, Plaintiff argued that the lower court erred in barring his testimony at trial. Plaintiff's counsel had requested that Plaintiff testify concerning his inability to perceive(...)
April 6, 2018
WILLIAM H. MONE reports on a recently published decision from the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division.
The parties were married in 1992 and had two children. The parties were divorced in 2010. As part of their divorce, the parties entered into a Marital Settlement Agreement ("MSA"), whereby the Husband was required to pay the Wife alimony and child support totaling $5,000 per month. The Husband's alimony and child support obligations were based upon his then earned income of $100,000 per year and the wife not having income, but instead attending nursing school. The MSA required that the parties revisit alimony and child support one year after the Wife's graduation from nursing school in 2013, as she was expected to obtain employment. If the Wife failed to so, the(...)
April 2, 2018
ROBERT B. SPAWN reports on a recent unpublished decision from the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division.
A recent New Jersey case involved a District filing an "inefficiency tenure" charge against a teacher in September 2014 after the teacher had received "partially effective" ratings based on annual evaluations for the previous two consecutive school years (2012-2013 and 2013-2014). An arbitrator granted the inefficiency tenure charge and ordered the teacher's termination. The teacher appealed this decision to a trial court in the Law Division.
The trial court reversed, reasoning that the arbitrator had exceeded or imperfectly executed his powers. The court noted that although there were statutory and regulatory provisions in place that allowed for the removal(...)
March 19, 2018
Robert B. Spawn reports on a recent unpublished decision from the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division.
A recent New Jersey case involved a former employee of a newspaper appealing Respondent-Board's final agency decision denying her claim for unemployment benefits. Appellant had worked as a sales representative for the newspaper for over thirty years, and, in August 2015, the newspaper announced by email that it was offering an early retirement program to encourage departures as a cost-cutting measure. Although the email stated that the retirement program was voluntary, it contained the following warning: "If we don't achieve our goals, we will need to re-evaluate where we stand and we can't rule out implementing other actions in the future." The email also stated that(...)
March 13, 2018
JASON S. HALLER reports that a Chancery court denied a failure-to-state-a-claim dismissal motion with regard to a retiring medical doctor's lawsuit to force a buyout of his interest in a medical practice.
The dispute was over the parties' agreed method of valuation. The Operating Agreement had a buy-sell clause that provided for a stipulated "Certificate of Agreed Value." But the plaintiff wanted "fair market value." He argued that the Certificate was sixteen years old—since that time, it had been the parties' course of conduct to utilize the fair market approach. The Certificate pegged the value of the practice at $2.4 million. Nonetheless, in 2009 and March 2016, the medical practice had obtained fair market valuations to assist in their business and financial planning(...)
