Business Litigation

Aggressive, Personal, and Exacting Representation in Business Litigation

Sally & Fitch LLP excels in representing both publicly and privately held corporations, general and limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and other entities and individuals in general business litigation. We have a broad range of experience handling contract, trade secret, intellectual property, securities and business-tort litigation. Clients turn to the firm when a deal or a partnership has soured, when complex arrangements have been disrupted, when intellectual assets or corporate secrets have been misappropriated, or when their interests are otherwise in jeopardy. Stakeholders in privately held corporations, and general and limited partnerships, also engage us for representation in internal disputes over control, valuation, fiduciary duties, and distribution of assets. They find the firm's aggressive, personal, and exacting approach second to none.

Examples from our Business Litigation Practice:

• We have represented numerous corporate officers in securities related litigation and investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Mass. Attorney Generals Office, and other government entities.
  
  
• Our client prevailed at a binding arbitration of a multifaceted dispute with fellow partners, and in obtaining summary judgment in which the court upheld the arbitrator's award against the adversary partners' intensive efforts to have the court vacate it.
  
  
• A contractor claimed an accidental oil spill by our client caused it to delay a construction project and thus lose profits. We obtained summary judgment denying the claim, and we won again on the contractors' appeal in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
  
  
• On behalf clients who were "frozen out" of a family business, we obtained a judgment dissolving the corporation, compensating our clients for nearly one million dollars in corporate losses sustained during the period of freeze-out, and ordering the other shareholder to pay back corporate funds which he had misappropriated. The Massachusetts Appeals Court affirmed that judgment.
  
  
• On behalf of clients that were sued for allegedly freezing out a partner in a joint venture involving several restaurants, we defeated a claim for substantial damages.
  
  
• We have successfully represented many companies and high-level officers in disputes involving non-competition and non-solicitation agreements and have provided advice with respect to negotiating employment and severance agreements.  For example, we represented an incoming CEO of a company in negotiating his new employment agreement and obtained a substantially larger benefit and payment package for him.
  
  
• When our client was sued by a competitor for misappropriation of trade secrets and the competitor sought to examine all of our client’s files and computer hard drives, we successfully stopped the discovery, obtained sanctions against the competitor and ended the litigation with our client incurring zero damages.
  
  
• We successfully represented a group of lawyers who were sued for breach of fiduciary duty and misappropriation of confidential information when they left a firm and started their own firm.
  
  
• We obtained a favorable settlement for a purchaser of a large boat when the seller refused to compensate him for mechanical defects that were present at the time of purchase.
  
  
• We won a dismissal of our client, a portfolio manager at a large investment company, from a class action suit alleging violations of Rule 10b-5, Section 36(a) of the Investment Company Act, unjust enrichment, and breaches of fiduciary duty.
  
  

Contact:
Peter E. Ball | Jonathan W. Fitch | Kurt S. Kusiak | John Miller | James B. Re