Welcome to your daily briefing on legal developments in Pennsylvania. Today we're covering 4 key stories including updates on pennsylvania legal headlines, background & context. Let's dive in.
1 story
CorpNet has published contact and document filing information for the Pennsylvania Secretary of State to help businesses with creation and maintenance filings.
Legal professionals handling PA entity formation, registrations, or compliance updates can use this centralized resource to streamline client filings and avoid procedural delays.
Reach professionals in this market
3 stories
Beyond civil-rights and consumer-protection statutes, many PA jurisdictions have fee-shifting provisions in landlord-tenant, mechanics' lien, insurance bad-faith, and construction-defect contexts. Pleading the fee-shifting statute in the complaint is typically required to preserve the right to recover.
A fee-shifting case has fundamentally different settlement dynamics than a non-fee case, especially in low-damages disputes where fees can dwarf the underlying claim.
Most non-compliance findings stem from three avoidable mistakes: claiming credit for the wrong reporting period, missing the ethics-credit minimum, and failing to retain proof of attendance for the audit lookback window (typically 5 years). State bar audits are random but increasing in frequency.
A CLE non-compliance finding is a public record in many states and triggers an administrative suspension that requires reinstatement application. Reinstatement is slower than initial admission in some jurisdictions.
A preservation (litigation hold) letter is appropriate as soon as litigation is reasonably anticipated, not just after a complaint is filed. The letter should identify the matter, the document categories at issue, and the recipient's preservation duty. Failure to send one is the leading evidence of spoliation in subsequent motion practice.
Sanctions for spoliation can include adverse-inference instructions, monetary fines, and in severe cases default judgment. The cost of issuing a hold letter is one paralegal hour.
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