Welcome to your daily briefing on legal developments in Pennsylvania. Today we're covering 5 key stories including updates on pennsylvania legal headlines, background & context. Let's dive in.
2 stories
The Philadelphia Bar Association has issued its recommendations for judicial retention candidates as the November 4 general election approaches.
PA legal professionals can use these bar-issued evaluations to inform their voting decisions and assess judicial performance ahead of the retention election.
The Philadelphia Bar Association Commission on Judicial Selection has issued its recommendations for 2023 judicial candidates.
PA legal professionals can review these evaluations to inform their understanding of judicial candidate qualifications in the Philadelphia region.
Reach professionals in this market
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Most conflict-of-interest systems index by named party only. They miss conflicts created when the named party is a wholly-owned subsidiary, a shared parent's affiliate, or a private-equity portfolio company under common control. The model rules treat these as conflicts even though no name match exists.
A conflict that surfaces mid-matter typically requires withdrawal at the worst possible moment, plus a fee writedown for work done. Catching it at intake is a 10-minute process; catching it at month six is a six-figure problem.
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.
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.
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