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Often, RICO cases fail due to very specific pleading errors. A RICO plaintiff may fail to meet the law’s requirements for pleading continuity, for pleading a valid RICO enterprise, for pleading underlying fraud claims with particularity, or for pleading an injury that qualifies under the law as “domestic,” not foreign. Whether you are pursuing a civil RICO case or defending against one, details matter a great deal, so be sure you have an experienced Atlanta civil RICO lawyer on your side.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an important ruling looking at the issue of domestic (versus foreign) injuries and civil RICO law. The case is an important win, in this world of multinational business, for non-U.S. residents who suffer racketeering harm in the U.S.

The RICO case upon which the Supreme Court just ruled involved a Russian plaintiff, V.S., and a real estate venture in Moscow gone wrong. V.S. filed an arbitration action in London and won a multimillion-dollar sum.

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Your business likely includes various elements of highly industry-specific knowledge. That can present a challenge if you encounter a need to bring a breach of contract lawsuit, as one or both sides may require experts to help the court make sense of the technical issues. When that happens, it is essential to ensure that the expert evidence the other side seeks to present meets all the standards the federal rules demand. If they don’t, you may be entitled to throw out that evidence. An experienced Atlanta commercial contract lawyer can help with this and every other vital step when it comes to making your case.

A contract dispute regarding a gas plant in Illinois offers a stark reminder of this truth. The buyer was a St. Louis-based energy company that sought to build a gasification plant (a facility that takes coal and water and produces synthetic natural gas.) The company contracted with another energy company for the purchase of needed equipment, including gasifiers.

Both sides, however, encountered problems. The buyer fell behind on the payments it owed. On the other side, the supplier’s equipment began experiencing problems. Similar gasifiers it sent to a plant in China were having difficulty converting coal into gas.

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In these challenging economic times, many businesses face substantial struggles. Sometimes, those struggles may lead a business that owes money to yours to fall behind on paying its debts. Of course, your business’ own success is predicated on getting paid the sums that are owed to you, and getting paid on a timely basis. When someone doesn’t, there may be an opportunity to work things out between the two sides. Other times, legal action may be necessary. When the latter is true, look to a knowledgeable Atlanta commercial debt collection lawyer for the legal representation your business needs.

If you’re a lender, dealing with a delinquent borrower can be complicated. There are various steps you can take to deal with the problem. However, if your situation reaches the point where litigation is necessary, you want not only to win your case but also to do so as quickly and efficiently as possible. Doing that may involve bringing — and winning — a motion for summary judgment.

A commercial lending dispute between an Atlanta business intelligence and data analytics company and its lender is a good example. The pair inked a loan agreement in late 2018. On the same day, the borrower submitted two promissory notes to the lender.

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After you’ve signed your commercial contract and you’ve done the work your contract prescribed, you expect to be paid what you’re owed under that agreement. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen, which may necessitate bringing a breach of contract lawsuit. An experienced Atlanta breach of contract lawyer can help you to get everything you owed in your contract breach action if litigation eventually proves necessary.

Achieving full success in this kind of case often means acquiring and presenting to the court a variety of forms of proof.

Take, for example, this breach of contract case from the federal court system. The case involved two corporations that signed a written contract in which one party, the service provider business, agreed to complete certain repair work on property owned by the other party. The agreement also came with a cost estimate of $86,000, “subject to a 10% increase.”

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In any sort of business or commercial dispute, there is a high probability that certain written documents will play an important role. Sometimes, though, it’s what isn’t written down that may hold the key to a successful case. In some situation, oral contracts may be valid and binding. In order for that to happen, though, there must be proof that a consummated agreement (in other words, a “meeting of the minds”) took place. Whether you are seeking to enforce or to oppose the enforcement of an oral contract in your business litigation, it helps to have the resources of skilled Georgia commercial debt collection counsel on your case.

One recent case in which the enforceability of an oral contract was at issue involved a farm and its agricultural products supplier. The farming business was owned by a husband and wife, and the wife’s father, T.E., signed a personal guaranty with the supply company guaranteeing payment of all of the farming company’s debts with the supply company. The wife’s father eventually decided he wanted to get out of farming and did not intend to continue guaranteeing the farm’s debts. He allegedly told the supply company’s branch manager about this decision, and the manager allegedly was “in total agreement” about the decision. No written document to this effect was ever produced at trial, however.

The farm racked up debts in excess of $200,000. The farm eventually missed payments, and the supply company asked T.E. to pay, based upon his guarantees. The man refused, and the supply company sued. The trial court eventually granted a summary judgment for the guarantor, which meant that the supply company lost its case before it even made it to trial. The judge concluded that T.E. had sufficiently established that he had rescinded his personal guaranty.

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Doing business today will often mean interactions with clients, contract partners, and others that may bring you into contact with many different states. This may sometimes bring about a situation in which you need to enforce a judgment from one state in another or defend against such a judgment. When these commercial litigation situations arise, it is important to have knowledgeable Georgia business counsel on your side who understands the law and the role the Georgia courts can play in pursuing the outcome you need. Recently, the Georgia Supreme Court entered an informative decision about using this state’s courts to oppose a judgment entered by another state.

The underlying relationship that eventually led to litigation in that recent case was a commercial contract between a telecom company and an IT services and training company. The contract called for the latter company to provide services for the former. Eventually, the relationship soured, and the services company sued in state court in St. Louis, Mo. That case was resolved when the trial court there entered a default judgment in favor of the plaintiff, awarding it $52,589. A default judgment is a final resolution of a court case in favor of one party due to the other party’s failure to take a required action to participate in the case. Often, these occur in favor of plaintiffs because defendants fail to respond or take other required actions.

Four months after securing the judgment in St. Louis, the plaintiff brought its case to Atlanta, asking a judge in Fulton County to enter an order of enforcement of foreign judgment. A foreign judgment is any judgment entered by any court outside Georgia. In order for your out-of-state judgment to be enforceable and collectible in this state, you have to get an order from a Georgia court declaring it to be recognized in this state. Georgia has something called the Uniform Enforcement of Foreign Judgment Act (UEFJA), which indicates what’s required to make your out-of-state judgment enforceable here.

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As a creditor, you understand that your business involves certain risks that “come with the territory.” Sometimes, a debtor’s business may fail to attract customers or may be destroyed by a catastrophic event. Other times, though, the debtor is not an innocent actor, such as cases where the debtor engages in fraudulent transfers to try to dodge having to pay. When that happens, you may have the opportunity to recover many forms of compensation, including punitive damages, but to do so, you have to know the right way to proceed in court. For that, rely on representation from a knowledgeable Atlanta creditor’s rights attorney.

An Ohio lender found itself in those shoes recently. The lender had lent substantial sums to the owner of a construction business. As the business faltered and the owner fell behind on his loan payments, he transferred numerous assets to a number of Florida LLCs and also to himself and his wife as “tenants by the entirety.” This had the effect of making those assets unreachable by the business owner’s creditors.

The lender was not without any recourse, however. The lender sued in federal court, asserting that the owner had violated Alabama’s Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act by transferring certain real estate to an LLC. A fraudulent transfer takes place when a borrower transfers interest in an asset or assets “with the actual intent to hinder, delay or defraud” a creditor.

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If you are a creditor, you may not know that assets transferred in divorce settlements can be considered voidable transfers. The court can either reverse the transfer or enter a judgement against the spouse receiving the transferred property.

Under the Uniform Voidable Transactions Act (UVTA), previously known as the Uniform Fraudulent Transfers Act (UFTA), a transfer may be fraudulent or voidable if the debtor made the transfer with intent to hinder, delay, or defraud any creditor of the debtor, or without receiving a reasonably equivalent value for the transferred property.

In a recent case, the Georgia Court of Appeals determined that a divorce settlement transferring assets could be considered a voidable transfer. In Enlow v. Enlow, 352 Ga.App. 865 (2019) https://casetext.com/case/enlow-v-enlow-2 a minor threatened to sue her grandfather for molestation. Twelve days later, the grandfather transferred five parcels of real property in a trust, previously held by him and his wife, solely to his wife. A month later, the couple filed for divorce, and the grandfather deeded all five parcels to the grandmother in the divorce settlement. This settlement was approved by the trial court.

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A “fraudulent conveyance” occurs when a debtor tries to avoid paying an unsecured debt by transferring property to another entity or person if the property is at risk of being seized by a creditor. In a Georgia appellate decision, a defendant LLLP appealed the lower court’s granting of an LLC’s motion asking to be substituted for the plaintiff in the lawsuit, as well as its motion for summary judgment denial. The defendant LLLP argued that the lower court had made a mistake in finding that the LLC had standing to recover under the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act (“UFTA”) claim.

The case arose in a trial of a different lawsuit. In that case, the court ordered the estate should specifically perform to buy the LLC’s stock from shareholders. A few months later the shareholders sued the estate, the LLLP and others asserting UFTA claims and asking for damages for fraudulent conveyances.

The plaintiffs claimed that a couple had created the LLLP in 2010 in order to transfer $5 million to the company with the goal of defrauding creditors. The couple asked for damages, including satisfaction of the $1.2 million judgment they’d been awarded. The plaintiffs argued that the UFTA allowed voiding of those transfers since they were made in order to defraud, delay or hinder the estate’s creditors (such as the plaintiff).

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