On April 7, 2021, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a victory for businesses and retailers who have faced growing numbers of lawsuits alleging their websites violated Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA") because they are not accessible to those who are vision-impaired. In so doing, the Eleventh Circuit reversed a bench trial verdict obtained by a plaintiff in the Southern District of Florida. This decision could be "felt" beyond the Eleventh Circuit as it contradicts with decisions from other federal circuits, making this issue now potentially ripe for intervention from the United States Supreme Court, which just passed on addressing this issue a few years ago....

North Carolina law is well established that architects and engineers owe a duty of care to those who reasonably rely on their work. This duty runs in favor of a builder regardless of whether there is a contract with the design professional. North Carolina law is equally well established that an unlicensed contractor is barred from enforcing certain remedies under the “licensure defense.” The licensure defense is a court-created doctrine seeking to incentivize compliance with statutory licensure requirements and to protect the public from incompetent builders. These two maxims of North Carolina construction law collided in a recent North Carolina Court of Appeals case, Wright Constr. Servs., Inc. v. Hard Art Studio, PLLC, No. COA19-1089, 2020 WL 7906704 (N.C. App. Dec. 31, 2020)....

A Superior Court Judge in Durham County, North Carolina recently ruled in favor of a number of restaurants in their collective action against Cincinnati Insurance for loss of business income due to the Covid-19 pandemic in a case captioned North State Deli, LLC, et al. v. The Cincinnati Insurance Company, et al., Case No. 20-CVS-02569. In a departure from courts across the country, the presiding judge held that government orders restricting the policyholders’ use of their restaurants constituted “direct physical loss” thus triggering the policies’ Business Income coverage. The court reasoned that the phrase “direct physical loss” “includes the inability to utilize or possess something in the real, material, or bodily world, resulting from a given cause with the intervention of other conditions” and therefore “describes the scenario where business owners…lose the full range of rights and advantages of using or accessing their business property.”...