NJ Appellate Law Blog – NJ Appellate Lawyer Bruce D. Greenberg blogs about Appeals and Appellate Law Practice

January, So Far

With the coming of the new year, this blog went onto a new platform. That fact, along with a Supreme Court oral argument and a Committee on Character hearing last week, has left this blog behind as 2025 begins. Our appellate courts, however, have been active. Here are summaries of their January 2025 published opinions to date:...

An Unusual Restrictive Employment Covenant Opinion From the Appellate Division

Accounteks.net, Inc. v. CKR Law, LLP, 475 N.J. Super. 493 (App. Div. 2023). The Appellate Division sometimes publishes one version of an opinion and designates as unpublished a longer version...

Discovery of Metadata

Estate of Lasiw v. Pereira, 475 N.J. Super. 378 (App. Div. 2023). Judge Messano's opinion in this medical malpractice case today is a relatively rare example of a published appellate...

Judge Smith Explains the Third Circuit's Standard for Rule 23(f) Appeals of Grants or Denials of Class Certification

Laudato v. EQT Corporation, ___ F.4th ___ (3d Cir. 2022). Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(f) states that "[a] court of appeals may permit an appeal from an order granting...

Receiver of a Defrauded Entity May Initiate Arbitration Even if Entity's Shareholders Will Ultimately Benefit From Any Recovery

Interactive Brokers, LLC v. Barry, 457 N.J. Super. 357 (App. Div. 2018). This final post of 2018 features an opinion issued today by Judge Currier. The case arose out of...

Motor Vehicle Commission Wrongly Sanctioned Car Dealers Without Holding Hearings

Allstars Auto Group, Inc. v. New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, 234 N.J. 150 (2018). The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission ("NJMVC") imposed fines and suspensions on eight car dealers for...

No Liability Expert Needed for Plaintiff Injured by Stepping Into Hole Negligently Left by Utility Employee

Jacobs v. Jersey Central Power & Light Co., 452 N.J. Super. 494 (App. Div. 2017). This opinion by Judge Sabatino today is an abbreviated version of a longer opinion that...

The Appellate Division Addresses the Noerr-Pennington Doctrine

Main Street at Woolwich, LLC v. Ammons Supermarket, Inc., 415 N.J. Super. 135 (App. Div. 2017). The Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which originated in two cases from the Supreme Court of the...

Whether a Child is Emancipated Requires Full Legal Analysis, and Findings and Conclusions

Ricci v. Ricci, 448 N.J. Super. 546 (App. Div. 2017). As Judge Lihotz observed in the opening sentence of her opinion for the Appellate Division in this case, Newburgh v....

Equitable Distribution Statute Does Not Apply to Property Acquired During Cohabitation, But Equitable Principles Come to the Rescue

Thieme v. Aucoin-Thieme, 227 N.J. 269 (2016). Plaintiff and defendant cohabited for eight years, were married for a short time, and then divorced. Before and during the marriage, plaintiff had...

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The Last Seven Days

The last seven days, an especially busy period for me, featured one Supreme Court opinion and two published Appellate Division decisions. Here are summaries of those rulings:...

No Ethics Violation in Attorney Purchasing Another Attorney's Name as a Keyword for Internet Searches, the Supreme Court Says, With a Caveat

In re Opinion No. 735 of the Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics, ___ N.J. ___ (2025). [Disclosure: I represented an amicus curiae in this appeal]. As Justice Noriega said in his opinion for a 5-1 majority (Justice Pierre-Louis did not participate), this appeal "presents the narrow question of whether it is permissible under the Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC) for an attorney or law firm to purchase a competing attorney's or law firm's name as a keyword." The Court found it permissible, with a caveat. Justice Fasciale dissented....

Four Criminal Law Cases, and a Qui Tam Appeal, for the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court announced today that it has granted review in five new appeals. One of them is before the Court on leave to appeal, while in the others the Court granted certification....

The "Limited Attorney Exemption" of the Debt Adjustment and Credit Counseling Act is Held Unconstitutional as Violative of the Separation of Powers and Void for Vagueness

Anchor Law Firm, PLLC v. State of New Jersey, ___ N.J. Super. ___ (App. Div. 2025). The Debt Adjustment and Credit Counseling Act, N.J.S.A. 17:16G-1 et seq. ("DACCA"), prohibits debt adjusters in New Jersey from operating for a profit. There is an exception for attorneys not "principally engaged" (a term not defined in the statute) in debt adjustment. That exception, adopted in a 1986 amendment, replaced a prior version of the DACCA that had exempted all attorneys from its scope....