Recent content by BostonFan

you mean? "While well-known for our land-use and commercial real estate practices, we also provide many other legal services." http://www.foster.com/industryDetail.aspx?display=1&industry=10 Or do you mean? Vice President, General CounselMike Fennell has served as vice president and...

This is exactly right.

Sure, well, one McDonalds franchisee could sue another McDonald's franchisee. (One company owned McDonalds couldn't sue another company owned, but, again, the NBA does not own its teams.) Could corporate step in if two franchisees had a dispute? Probably not, depending on the nature of the...

That makes a lot of sense to me. With the system in force at the time, he was made a free agent. However, it's turned out to be a pretty weak system. The NBA should probably go back and look at this one, so their owners don't fight over things like this. Nothing to do about this though. The...

Good questions: 1) Not "owned" by the NBA. They are independent businesses bought from the NBA - the term that gets used is "franchise," but most are corporations or limited partnerships. The association of the teams and the NBA is governed by an extensive partnership agreement that the...

I've been waiting for someone to ask about the law here, but nobody has taken the bait! Here goes. First of all, it is a much contested legal concept. A fiduciary duty is a kind of unwritten rule, and some courts, and many legal scholars, don't like to give a wide berth to unwritten rules...

My guess is that somebody got all pissed off and went to the attorneys, and the attorneys did what attorneys do and took care of their clients. "Let's write a letter!" Some junior lawyer did 10 minutes of research on the fiduciary duty thing, and it sounded good at the time, so "whammo."...

Thank you! Yes, a lawyer wrote it, and a lawyer wrote Gilbert's response (which I assume was on behalf of the owners). It's funny, that is the kind of typo that a spell check won't catch....

No, but they won't choose to sue. Again, a team could stand up and say "I did it to get Paul Allen's luxury tax payment" and there still would be nothing to sue over. It's empty sabre rattling.

It reads like posturing for the unions to me. The rest of the owners I'm sure want to distance themselves from this. There is nothing to be gained by claiming that there are unwritten rules teams should live by when dealing with player contracts. And Gilbert's e-mail says we live by the...

the whole point of the clause is that Miles was deemed unfit to play. 10 games is very generous. The Blazers are darned lucky that the threshold was not being signed to a regular season roster. That is what it should have been. Again, this stupid move by your Blazers almost guarantees that...

This is a tricky area of the law, but this is not a tricky case. Yes, joint venture partners sometimes are bound by fiduciary duties. No, they do not apply in this circumstance. It's pretty clear that a team could stand up and say, "We are going to play Darius Miles for 2 games and then cut him...