Last week the Nebraska Supreme Court decided an interesting appellate jurisdictional question. In Picard v. P& C Group I, 306 Neb. 292, the Supreme Court confronted allocation in a worker’s compensation case. The plaintiff had twice suffered work-related injuries, each to a different body part. Both injuries resulted in permanent partial disability and loss of earning capacity. The question was whether the worker’s compensation court could apportion any loss of [...]

The long arm of personal jurisdiction. As our nation’s economy becomes increasingly interconnected, the concept of personal jurisdiction—which governs when a court can constitutionally bind a defendant with a judgment—has become all the more important. This is especially true in an era of litigation tourism where the venue in which a case has been filed can significantly impact the quality of justice the parties receive. In the past decade, the [...]

Appealing Litigation first addressed the 2017 “facelift” to the summary judgment statute in an October 2017 blog post. In her post, Partner Cathy Trent-Vilim noted that the revisions to Nebraska’s summary judgment statute, Neb. Rev. Stat. § 25-1332, now require the moving party, as well as the responding party, to provide citations to the evidence in support of their assertions of fact. After the statute became effective, it was unclear [...]

As discussed in the previous blog post regarding evidence admissible for motions to dismiss, courts can only consider limited types of evidence when deciding motions to dismiss. Public Records and Judicially Noticed Matters Public records, and subjects of judicial notice, are other forms of evidence defendants can properly rely upon on a motion to dismiss. Typically, all that is required is attaching the record since authenticity is not generally an [...]

In an unpublished opinion, the Nebraska Court of Appeals recently remanded a case back to the trial court and ordered that the defendant be re-sentenced by a new judge. The opinion arose out of the conviction of 21 year old Taylor W. Welty-Hackett ("Welty"). He pled no contest to attempted first degree sexual assault. The plea agreement stemmed from Welty's intercourse with a 12 year old girl -- who he claimed said she [...]