There are plenty of advantages to practicing business divorce litigation in New York.  The diversity of businesses and clients, complexity of agreements and transactions, and excellence of judges and attorneys make New York, in my view, the place to be for commercial litigators of all stripes.

One downside is the reality that crowded dockets and busy judges sometimes results in too terse decisions from the trial and appellate courts.  At the appellate level, hundreds of pages of evidence, and nuanced, extensively briefed legal theories are sometimes reduced to a one-line decision.  Not only do those one-liners inevitably leave the parties dissatisfied, but they also miss an opportunity to lend reasoned, precedential analysis to complex and unsettled questions of law.

But in some sense, that’s where the lawyers come in.  New cases can be won or lost in the grey areas created by brief appellate authority, and the sharpest lawyers will find the precedential value in even the shortest appellate decisions.

These few paragraphs are already much longer than the Fourth Department’s recent decision affirming dismissal of a shareholder’s claim for dissolution pursuant to BCL 1104-a in Kavanaugh v Consumers Beverages, Inc., 205 NYS3d 637 (4th Dept 2024).  But in a few words, the Fourth Department packs a punch in corporate dissolution jurisprudence.Continue Reading Termination, Adequate Alternative Remedies Sends Dissolution Proceeding Packing