Business Law

By Paul J. Pascuzzi* The Business Law Section is proud to announce that Susan H. Mac Cormac has been selected to receive the Business Law Section’s 2025 Roland E. Brandel Lifetime Achievement Award. This prestigious award is given annually to a California lawyer who “over an extended period has made significant contributions to the Business Law Section or to business law generally in the State of California and who has achieved high status in the legal community.” The Roland E… Read more

Courtesy of CEB, we are bringing you selected legal developments in areas of California business law that are covered by CEB’s publications. This month’s feature is a preview of the September 2025 update of Sales and Mergers of California Businesses. Read more

When I was first recruited to be an active member of a CLA subcommittee, I had no clue how the system was structured. I was recruited to join the Insolvency Law Committee, a committee of the BLS. (The BLS is one of eighteen sections of the CLA; that is a story for a different day.) Read more

James A. (“Jim”) Hayes, Jr. is currently the chair of the CLA Insolvency Law Committee’s Education Subcommittee and a member of the Legislation Subcommittee. Throughout his nearly 30 years as a member of the legal profession, Jim Hayes has blended representing clients as a practicing lawyer with an academic career as a law professor, both full-time and part-time. In his law practice, Jim is a founder of Zinser | Hayes with attorney Kelly Zinser.  Jim concentrates on corporate and business… Read more

July 2025 Recently, I had someone ask me, why do you bother being civil with that person?  You know they’ll never treat you with respect, let alone civility, and in any case, they appear to favor cruelty above all else, so why bother?  Ultimately, that is one of the main reasons our clients come to us.  They have an irreconcilable disagreement with another party or parties, and they would like us to advise them on how to navigate those challenges… Read more

The following is a case update written by Hale Andrew Antico, Chief Counsel of Antico Law Firm, analyzing Applegate v Carrington Foreclosure Services, ___ Cal. Rptr. 3rd ___,  2025 WL 1766233 (Court of Appeal, First District, California (June 26, 2025)). Read more

On June 17, 2025 the California on Frontier AI Policy, prepared by an expert working group at the request of Governor Gavin Newsom was released. This comprehensive forward-looking policy comes after Newsom vetoed previous legislation attempting to regulate AI systems in 2024. Read more

The Hon. J. Barrett Marum sat down with Gary Rudolph and Kathleen Cashman-Kramer to talk about his first ten months on the bench. Read more

In Lysyy v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co., ___ F.4th. ___ (W.D. Wash., May 27, 2025) (“Lysyy”), the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington (the “District Court”) granted the motion of the defendant (the “Defendant”) to strike the jury demand of the plaintiff (the “Plaintiff”) for violation of the automatic stay under Bankruptcy Code § 362(k) and to quiet title on the grounds that both were claims in equity for which the Seventh Amendment of the United States Constitution (the “Seventh Amendment”) does not guarantee a jury trial in federal court.  Read more

The United Staes Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Mississippi (the Court) recently held that damages arising from an employer’s failure to give the required notices under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (the “WARN Act”) ware entitled to priority as wages under 11 U.S.C. § 704(a)(4).  Read more