FAIRFIELD CONNECTICUT BUILDING EXPERT
DIRECTORY AND CAPABILITIES

Developer Transition – Washington DC Condominiums

June 29, 2017 — Nicholas D. Cowie - Maryland Condo Construction Defect Law Blog
Developer transition is the process by which governance over a condominium unit owners’ association (“condominium association”) is transferred from condominium developer to unit owner control. Below is an overview of the legal requirements in the District of Columbia that govern this transition process as well as a “transition checklist” for unit owner-elected boards of directors that have recently transitioned from developer control. TRANSITION LAW OVERVIEW PERIOD OF DEVELOPER CONTROL A developer initially controls a condominium association because it owns all unsold units in the newly created condominium. As such, the condominium developer has the controlling votes associated with majority ownership and can appoint its own employees as the initial members of the board of directors and thereby control how the association conducts its affairs. This is referred to as the “period of developer control,” during which the condominium developer makes all decisions on behalf of the condominium association. The developer also creates a condominium association’s governing documents allowing it to dictate, subject to applicable law, the procedures and time periods under which control over the association’s board of directors is ultimately transferred to the unit owners. Read the court decision
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Reprinted courtesy of Nicholas D. Cowie, Cowie & Mott, P.A.
Mr. Cowie may be contacted at ndc@cowiemott.com

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New Notary Language For Mechanics Lien Releases and Stop Payment Notice Releases

January 21, 2015 — Garret Murai – California Construction Law Blog
Thanks to Scott Wolfe, Jr. over at ZLien for bringing this to my attention: Effective January 1, 2015, the notary language required for Certificates of Acknowledgment – used by notaries for mechanics lien releases and stop payment notice releases in California – now require the following new wording to appear at the top of the notary certificate in a box:

A notary public or other officer completing this certificate verifies only the identity of the individual who signed the document to which this certificate is attached, and not the truthfulness, accuracy, or validity of that document.

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Reprinted courtesy of Garret Murai, Wendel Rosen Black & Dean LLP
Mr. Murai may be contacted at gmurai@wendel.com

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The Irresistible Urge to Build Cities From Scratch

November 21, 2018 — Monte Reel - Bloomberg
Embedded in the cerebral folds of every city planner who’s ever lived, there’s a cluster of neurons that lights up like Las Vegas when confronted with the possibility of a blank slate. It started with Hippodamus, the man Aristotle claimed was the father of urban planning. When the Persians destroyed his hometown of Miletus, Hippodamus discovered a bright side to catastrophe: The attackers had erased all the regrettable improvisations that, over the centuries, had made a mess of the place. Tasked with rebuilding, he seized his chance to impose order upon chaos. And so the concept of the urban grid was born. Ever since, the dream of carte blanche has proved an all-but-irresistible seduction. Leonardo da Vinci drafted detailed sketches of an “ideal city” after the plague ravaged Milan, and a few hundred years later, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a metropolis that solved the problem of vehicular congestion via a network of helicopter taxis. Every so often, this urge in city planners breaks out into a full-scale epidemic, such as the one that spread throughout Europe and North America in the early 1900s. Known as the “garden city movement,” it aimed to counter the indignities of the Industrial Revolution by creating planned communities with plenty of green space. Read the court decision
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Reprinted courtesy of Monte Reel, Bloomberg

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Rachel Reynolds Selected as Prime Member of ADTA

April 05, 2021 — Rachel Tallon Reynolds - Lewis Brisbois
Seattle Partner Rachel Tallon Reynolds was recently selected as a prime member of the Association of Defense Trial Attorneys (ADTA), an exclusive designation bestowed upon only one lawyer per one million population for each city, town, or municipality. The ADTA is a select group of diverse and experienced civil defense trial attorneys whose mission is to improve their practices through collegial relationships, educational programs, and business referral opportunities, while maintaining the highest standards of professionalism and ethics. ADTA members possess the highest skill level of civil defense trial attorneys. Moreover, because ADTA invites only one defense trial attorney to be its prime member per one million in population for each city, town, or municipality across the United States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Canada, France and The United Kingdom of Great Britain, as well as Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a prime membership represents the high regard in which that defense trial attorney is held by his or her peers in the defense trial bar of their city and state or province. Read the court decision
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Reprinted courtesy of Rachel Tallon Reynolds, Lewis Brisbois
Ms. Reynolds may be contacted at Rachel.Reynolds@lewisbrisbois.com

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Impairing Your Insurer’s Subrogation Rights

May 06, 2024 — David Adelstein - Florida Construction Legal Updates
Liability insurance policies have a provision that allows them to subrogate to the rights of their insured. This provision is commonly referred to as a transfer of rights provision and reads: If the insured has rights to recover all or part of any payment we have made under this Coverage Part, those rights are transferred to us. The insured must do nothing after loss to impair them. At our request, the insured will bring “suit” or transfer those rights to us and help us enforce them. In a recent dispute, an insurer sued its insured claiming the insured breached the insurance policy-a contract—by impairing the insurer’s subrogation rights. In other words, the insurer claimed its insured breach the insurance contract and the transfer of rights provision above. Read the court decision
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Reprinted courtesy of David Adelstein, Kirwin Norris, P.A.
Mr. Adelstein may be contacted at dma@kirwinnorris.com

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Housing-Related Spending Made Up Significant Portion of GDP in Fourth Quarter 2013

March 31, 2014 — Beverley BevenFlorez-CDJ STAFF
On the Insights Blog of CoreLogic, Molly Boesel reported that “housing-related spending made up 17.4 percent of GDP in [the] fourth quarter [of] 2013,” according to the latest release by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The numbers published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis demonstrated “upward revisions in overall GDP and housing-related expenditures from the second estimate released in February 2014.” Boesel explained how they determined the housing-related spending number: “To calculate the portion of domestic spending that is related to housing, we look at three expenditures from the release: residential investment (the construction of new single- and multi-family houses), spending on housing services (rent, owner’s equivalent rent and utilities) and spending on furnishings and durable goods. Together, these expenditures made up 17.4 percent of total real GDP in the fourth quarter of 2013, the same as this time a year ago and down from the high of 20.6 percent in the third quarter of 2005.” Read the court decision
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Gilroy Homeowners Sue over Leaky Homes

February 10, 2012 — CDJ STAFF

Two years into a lawsuit against Shapell Homes, the builder of a subdivision called Eagle Ridge in Gilroy, California, homeowners have joined or left the lawsuit. About fifty homeowners are still in the suit, which contends that construction defects have lead to water intrusion in their homes. The lawyer for the homeowners contends that more than a hundred homes have construction defects.



One homeowner said that soon after he joined the suit, Sharpell sent workers to his home who repaired problems to his satisfaction. “They came in within two weeks and fixed everything,” said Frank Lowry. Another homeowner, Wilson Haddow, said that he was “quite happy” after Shapell repaired problems.



Others weren’t quite so happy. Greg Yancey said that problems had “been a nightmare” and that “it just doesn’t feel like home.” He said that his “house is possessed,” with problems that include walls that bow out and a balcony that drips rainwater to the front door. His home is currently worth far less than the $700,000 he paid in 2007.

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Anchoring Abuse: Evolution & Eradication

October 09, 2023 — Tim Capowski & Chris Theobalt - Kahana Feld
Over the past few years, the plaintiff bar has expanded its use of improper anchoring tactics. Historically, improper anchoring was seen as a risky tactic in which a plaintiff’s counsel would suggest an outrageous figure for pain and suffering during summation in the hope that the lay jury would either award it or split the difference (cut the suggested figure by half) and, either way, return an excessive or runaway verdict. Plaintiff counsel deployed the tactic infrequently through the turn of the century for fear of alienating the jury by appearing greedy. Two interrelated factors happened to change this dynamic. First, the plaintiff bar worked extremely hard in the intervening years with great success to shed its “ambulance chaser” stereotype by marketing itself as the “protector of the vulnerable”. Second, with the rise in Reptile and punitive tactics spawned in part by the publication of the Reptile handbook, the plaintiff bar also discovered that juries were not alienated by outrageous anchors as long as they were preceded by Reptile commentary essentially to “prime” the jury to punish the defendant rather than compensate the plaintiff with its award. This is not speculation. I recall sitting outside a courtroom with one of New York’s top plaintiff attorneys in 2006 during deliberations on a catastrophic personal injury trial, during which he conceded to me that he was worried he had asked the jury for too large a figure (it was not even eight figures). A decade later in 2016, that same attorney felt no trepidation in requesting nearly $100 million for a comparable injury. He fed the jurors a steady diet of Reptile tactics from start to finish and they dutifully awarded the requested figure. Our research confirms that this two-step strategy (Reptile + improper anchor) preceded every New York nuclear verdict returned from 2010-2022. The same is almost certainly true of most nuclear verdicts in other jurisdictions. Reprinted courtesy of Tim Capowski, Kahana Feld and Chris Theobalt, Kahana Feld Mr. Capowski may be contacted at tcapowski@kahanafeld.com Mr. Theobalt may be contacted at ctheobalt@kahanafeld.com Read the court decision
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