Here is a link to a blog on covenants not to compete – a fascinating area of litigation.
Tennessee has a lot of law in this area, and a recent Tennessee Supreme Court case on the subject was essentially reversed by a new statute.
If you do this type of work you may find this blog of assistance to you.
B2B tort litigation is a growing phenomena, as big firm lawyers start to think outside of the box. Here is a new blog dedicated to the subject –Unfair Business Practices.
The blog focuses on unfair business and trade practices such as business conspiracy, breach of fiduciary duty, misappropriation of trade secrets and other proprietary information, fraud, tortious interference with contracts and other unfair business practices that are not neatly defined."
The blog is published by the Williams Mullen firm in Virginia.
The Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled that a parent corporation may be sued for intentional interference with a contractual relationship between a partially owned subsidiary and a third party.
The Court had ruled in an earlier case that " a parent corporation has a privilege pursuant to which it can cause a wholly-owned subsidiary to breach a contract without becoming liable for tortiously interfering with a contractual relationship.” However, in this case the Court said that "[w]e conclude that the privilege does not extend when a parent owns less than 100% of a subsidiary. The foundation of [our prior decision in] Waste Conversion and the reasoning upon which it rests is that the qualified privilege should be extended when there is a full and complete identity of interest between a parent corporation and its subsidiary. When there exists such an identity of interest, courts are justified in treating two legally separate entities as one and in extending the immunity from tortious interference that is normally enjoyed only by the parties to a contract. However, courts are not justified in extending the privilege when the interests of the parent and the subsidiary are not identical."
The Court said this as well: "Having availed themselves of the benefits of separate corporations, the [defendant] Companies argue that we should now disregard their corporate structure in order to shield them from liability. … Because we respect the separate legal status of a corporation and its shareholders, we are equally reluctant to disregard corporateness to create liability as we are to disregard corporateness to remove liability."
Judge Bill Koch has written a opinion that is worth a read by everyone who visits this blog. The case is Johnson v. John Hancock Funds, No. M2005-00356-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App., M.S., June 30, 2006).
Plaintiffs claimed that they received poor advice from their financial advisor and suffered a loss of money. They brought suit under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act and also asserted several common law torts.
The trial court dismissed the TCPA claim. The Court of Appeals reversed, saying, in part, that:
Day on Torts