It Is Best If These Situations Are Prefaced With In-House Negotiations
Video Transcribed: Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Attorney Isaiah Brydie coming at you with another video, and this video is going to be all about lawsuits and suing your other business partners. We finally made it here. This is the coup de grâce.
We’re going to talking about suing your business partners, the other members of the LLC, majority owners of a share of a corporation, or even board of directors for that matter, all in the same video. If you want to watch the particular steps of the other business structures, look at the previous videos.
As a general matter, again, most of these situations are going to be prefaced with in-house negotiations or arbitrations what have you. Then from there, you’ll be able to have that ability to actually file a lawsuit as a minority shareholder, or as a general member of an LLC.
Then also too depending on if there is a potential breach of those fiduciary duties, you may even be able to file that lawsuit before you even have that arbitration.
I’m going to start there in that situation. Let’s say we have somebody who has threatened the other owners of the business, and threatened to shut the business down and sell all of the assets and everything like that.
That would be serious and immediate irreparable harm to the business. I would suggest that you immediately go in and file for a temporary restraining order on a business. It works a little bit like a protective order does on a person.
To where you initiate your lawsuit by filing your petition. Stating out with short and plain language the grievances that you have. Then going in and immediately filing for what’s called a temporary restraining order.
That temporary restraining order, once you’re able to meet your burden of proof on that document, you’re then able to go in and also file what’s called a writ of assistance.
Some people who are familiar with family law matters, I’m not going to get into how you’re familiar with them, but you might be familiar with a writ of assistance, because that’s the document that is the court order that tells the Sheriff’s Office to go and seize children.
Well, in this situation, a writ of assistance is the document that empowers the Sheriff’s Office to go out and seize assets of the business. Before you ask yes, I have gotten a writ of assistance and have had the sheriff empowered to go and seize weed on my behalf, on my client’s behalf against another business.
Actually done it a couple of times now, but as an aside from that. You file that temporary restraining order, and then after that you have 10 days before your show cause hearing.
At that show cause hearing is where you put on evidence to show irreparable harm that will be done on behalf of the business if the temporary restraining order is not kept in place.
Depending on the judge, if they’re good or not, or also too depending on the situation, the issue might be at that point, and the temporary restraining order will probably be lifted. No fault to you because you’ve already seized the assets on behalf of the business.
Then the fight goes to whether or not you need to give them up, or actually return them to the business. I’m not going to get into that stuff on that one, but that’s where the fight then transitions to.
That’s a general rundown of things that happen there. Going on from there, you’re looking at doing your standard court posturing and things like that.
Someone will probably file for a settlement conference with the court, as you are allotted to do by statute. Then from there more likely than not you’ll probably settle. Or you could just get somebody who’s a hardliner on the other side, and they’ll just say, “Dang, we’re going to go to trial on this.”
It really depends on a case by case basis. Either way it goes as long as you dot your t’s and cross your i’s.
As long as you’ve crossed your t’s and dot your i’s, that should not be something that should dissuade you if you are actually aggrieved from following through with your initial actions.
Obviously as these things progress and as this industry evolves, there’s going to be a lot more litigation that ends up happening on behalf of a lot of these other businesses.
Obviously the goal is to make sure that we’re doing business with people who we trust and are reputable. Making sure that we have our governing documents on behalf of the business buttoned up.
Making sure that we have a clear understanding of things that we can and cannot do, and how we need to do things and everything.
Also just having good best business practices in place, so that we don’t find ourselves in any situation where anybody needs to go into arbitration, let alone actually consider filing litigation on behalf of a business.
That’s my general summation on behalf of doing litigation on a business. If you guys have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. I appreciate you guys watching.