The special litigation committee is a powerful tool, and corporations should not be allowed to resort to it prematurely: an analysis from Joseph Pull and Scott Benson, published in the most recent volume of the University of St. Thomas Law Journal.Read More

Stacking together two major life events – a divorce and the sale of a multi-million-dollar business – can be a recipe for major headaches and complex interacting consequences.  In the recent Minnesota Gill case, a business sale during a divorce revealed a potential loophole through which an owner-executive tried to avoid sharing assets with a...Read More

The Minnesota Supreme Court decided two unrelated disputes about the enforcement of employment contracts within the space of thirty days this summer. Both decisions allowed the employee to elude, at least temporarily, the plain language of a contractual obligation. An employee who failed to timely return his employer’s property after leaving the company was allowed...Read More

An elementary principle of litigation is keeping an eye on the elements. A federal appellate court decided in August that the federal mail and wire fraud statutes allow a defendant to be convicted for engaging in a “scheme to defraud” even if the defendant’s deceptive statements were made to different people than the victims who actually...Read More

In a dispute over whether a defendant could claim immunity from being sued, the Minnesota Supreme Court recently relied upon a principle of grammar to determine the meaning of the word “or” in the applicable statute.[1]  The Court deployed the terms “conjunctively” and “disjunctively” to explain its decision, and the cases cited in the Court’s opinion show that legal...Read More

The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled on April 6, 2016, that a parishioner could not sue her former church and pastors for defamation in statements made within church disciplinary proceedings to excommunicate the parishioner from the church.[1] The explosive mix of high-profile issues present in the case obscures a smaller technical point which may prove crucial in...Read More