If you ever look at the Business Court’s website, you’ve noticed that the Court added late last year a new category of rulings, which it has dubbed “Orders of Significance.”  There are 118 of these Orders, stretching back ten years, to 2010.

The Court is statutorily mandated to publicly post a number of its rulings, per N.C.G.S. § 7A-45.3, which obligates the Court to issue a written Opinion on rulings rendered per NCRCP 12, 56, 59, and 60, but these Orders of Significance don’t fall into those categories.

I asked Chief Judge Bledsoe (via email) what had prompted the posting of these Orders.  He responded that the Court thought that these Orders “would be of interest to the Bar” and that the Court had been contemplating adding them for a while.  As for their content, he said that these Orders “cover a wide variety of subject matters and include TROs, preliminary injunctions, discovery rulings, receivership orders, contempt orders, and designation orders, among others.”

I asked Judge Bledsoe if there were any “extra” Significant Orders in this sprawling body of work, because I don’t have the desire or the energy to plow unguided through 118 rulings.  To my disappointment, he said that he didn’t “know that any are more significant than the others.”

Nevertheless, he did advise that all of the Court’s orders regarding challenges to the designation of a case to the Business Court are in this group of rulings, and that he thought that these would be of interest to readers of this blog.  So I have elected to write about them as a start on these significant Orders.

But when I attempted to use the search function on the Court’s website to find the Orders regarding designation, it yielded nothing.  It looks to me like the search function will not get into the text of the Orders, but only the case names.

So, I have created my own searchable file of all of these Orders.  And coming Monday is the first of what will be several dives into these 118 Orders of Significance.  I’ll start with the Orders regarding designation to the Business Court.