Mr. Patterson at an emergency product inspection in Shanghai, China. A contracting partner had accused our client of cheating on an exclusive sourcing contract. The case resolved on the eve of an injunction hearing.
In most cases, the parties to a lawsuit are fighting about money: one party or the other is going to pay money to the other to compensate it for the claimed wrongs that were done. But sometimes, money is not enough. What if, by the time the lawsuit is decided, the treasurer has run off to Siberia with all the money: you would only have a worthless money judgment after spending the time and money to litigate. If an employee has stolen your trade secrets and is giving them to a competitor, you need to stop him or her now before your entire business is ruined. If a competitor is using your trademark, you want to stop the competitor immediately before customers get used to the idea of going to someone else – and the damage you will sustain from lost customers can be very difficult to measure.
A preliminary injunction may be the answer to these dilemmas. It is a court order requiring someone to do something or refrain from doing something and it can be obtained relatively quickly. Its cousin, the temporary restraining order, can be obtained immediately without formal notice to your opponent, but it lasts for only ten days – enough time to hold a hearing to decide whether you are entitled to a preliminary injunction.
Other cases in which injunctions are commonly requested include partners who want to prevent the sale of a partnership asset; a medical residency program or hospital or school that wants to prevent its loss of accreditation; shareholders who want to prevent waste of corporate assets; businesses that want to prevent the loss of trade secrets or stop a raid on its key employees by a person or business not privileged to do so; and many others.
Tom Patterson wrote the book on injunctions (
"Handling the Business Emergency: temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions"), just published by the American Bar Association.
We work fast under emergency conditions. We also consult on an emergency basis. For example, a construction company might need advice regarding a payment delay or how to respond to a request to perform extra work without documentation. Contracting parties might want to know whether it is necessary to mitigate damages after a breach has occurred and, if so, how this mitigation might be accomplished.
We have experience with:
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