About The Business Court

The Business Court issued a significant Order last week, in Composite Fabrics of America, LLC v. Edge Structural Composites, Inc., 2016 NCBC 11 that Judge Gale said was an "opportunity to clarify. . .how the Court interprets the statutory mandates for designating a case as a mandatory complex business case"  and that the Business

i was gone (not fishin’) for the entire month of September.  I haven’t written on this blog since August and nobody has noticed.  Nobody has emailed me to ask where the heck I was or what I was doing or whether anything worth knowing had happened in the Business Court  The lack of any outcry about my absence hurt my feelings, but I am back even so with this September update on cases in the Business Court decided during the missing September.  They ran the gamut, from subpoenas to injunctions to how not to get an extension of time in the Business Court.

Standing to Object to Subpoenas to Non-Party Banks

In Deyton v. Estate of Kenneth C. Waters, Jr., 2011 NCBC 34, Judge Gale ruled that a party to a lawsuit lacked standing to object to a subpoena sent by the opposing party to a non-party bank.  The Judge observed that "as a general proposition, parties to a lawsuit typically lack standing to challenge a subpoena issued to a third party." 

Although there is an exception to that general rule if the objecting party has privilege in the documents requested,  the moving party attempted to invoke, Judge Gale held there is not a privilege created in bank records by the Federal Right  to Privacy Act of 1978 (12 U.S.C. §3402) or the North Carolina Financial Privacy Act (N.C. Gen. Stat. §53B-1, et seq.).

The rule might be different in federal court.  Judge Gale stated in a footnote that an Eastern District of North Carolina court has said in United States v. Gordon, 247 F.R.D. 509, 510 (E.D.N.C. 2007) that "[a] small number of courts have held that a party’s claimed privilege with respect to his or her bank account records is sufficient to confer standing for purposes of challenging a subpoena."

In another case decided on the same day, Jones v. Sutherland, Judge Murphy, without the benefit of the Deyton discussion, considered an objection by a defendant to a subpoena to a non-party bank.  He denied the motion to limit the subpoena even though it covered a nine-year "extensive time period," saying it was not "designed to be a fishing expedition."Continue Reading I’m Back With An Update on Six Business Court Cases

The North Carolina Business Court was formed in 1995, largely inspired by Delaware’s Chancery Court.  Our state recently returned the favor:  Delaware now has created its own business court division of its Superior Court, sparked by the experiences of North Carolina and sixteen other states.  Delaware’s new Complex Commercial Litigation Division (“CCLD”) shares some common