Welcome to your daily briefing on legal developments in Pennsylvania. Today we're covering 7 key stories including updates on pennsylvania legal headlines, background & context. Let's dive in.
4 stories
The Philadelphia Bar Association has issued its recommendations for judicial retention candidates before the November 4 general election.
PA legal professionals rely on bar association evaluations to inform their understanding of judicial candidate qualifications and fitness for the bench.
CorpNet has published contact and document filing information for the Pennsylvania Secretary of State to help businesses create or maintain their entity status.
Legal professionals advising PA clients on entity formation, compliance, or annual maintenance can use this centralized resource to streamline filings and avoid administrative delays.
The Philadelphia Bar Association Commission on Judicial Selection has issued its recommendations for 2023 judicial candidates.
These recommendations guide PA legal professionals evaluating judicial candidates for the Philadelphia courts.
The Washington State Court System provides assistance for accessing public court records.
Pennsylvania legal professionals may find useful models for streamlining their own court record access workflows and client research processes.
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.
A consistently followed retention policy provides a defense against spoliation claims when documents are destroyed in the ordinary course before litigation was anticipated. Without a policy, every routine deletion looks like targeted destruction in hindsight.
Adverse-inference instructions arising from spoliation routinely turn winnable cases into losses. A documented policy, consistently applied, is the cleanest defense available.
A clear scope-of-work paragraph — naming the specific matter, what is included, and what is explicitly excluded — eliminates roughly 70% of fee disputes by attorneys who track them. Generic "represent client in connection with X matter" language invites assumption-based conflict when adjacent issues surface mid-engagement.
Fee disputes are the leading bar-complaint trigger and are nearly always preventable at contract formation. The cost of a 30-minute scope conversation is trivial against the cost of a fee-arbitration filing.
Get Pennsylvania legal intelligence delivered to your inbox every morning.
Subscribe FreeView all past issues
Feature your brand across the U.S., Canada, and select international markets and 10 industry verticals.
Become a National Partner