Blacksburg Law Blog

The Blacksburg area can be a great place to start a business, but one of the keys to doing so successfully is picking out the right location for that new enterprise. After all, even in this day of online shopping and service, most businesses will still need some sort of traditional brick-and-mortar presence.

Instead of investing in real estate outright, some business owners may decide that leasing commercial property is the best route to take for their business. In this respect, though, it is important to remember a couple of things about commercial leases. First, unlike a residential lease, they tend to be much more open to negotiation.

While the biggest mergers and acquisitions make national news, the reality is that a whole range of business organizations of various sizes in Virginia may come to a point in which their leadership wishes to buy another business outright. Alternatively, the leadership may wish to combine forces with another business, perhaps even under a new name. At each stage of the process, a business merger presents legal issues that can be difficult to resolve yet are of utmost importance to the interests of all parties involved.

For instance, once they start discussing the possibility of merging, oftentimes businesses will sign agreements about how their negotiations will proceed. These contracts need to be carefully drafted in order to make sure trade secrets, sensitive financial information and other important and confidential information get the protection they deserve.

As in nearly every state, semi-truck accidents are on the rise. When fully loaded, an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer can weight upwards of 80,000 pounds. Unevenly distributed weight inside the vehicle can become unstable, causing it to slide, jack-knife or roll over. Added to the mix, standard passenger vehicles only weigh around 4,000 pounds. In an accident with an 80,000-pound big rig, those in the passenger vehicle are less likely to escape without serious injuries or fatalities.

While most truck drivers try to drive responsibly, some trucking companies push them to ignore rest and mileage limits. Speeding and breaking traffic laws become even more problematic when delivery times govern whether a driver is fired. When big trucking companies value profit over lives, the risk of catastrophic heavy-truck accidents increases dramatically.

A previous post on this blog talked about how the Virginia Legislature passed a law that will ban motorists in this state from holding their phones while their vehicles are in motion. The previous post suggested that, while the law will probably help keep drivers from holding their phones, it may not do much in the way of reducing car accidents related to distracted driving.

However, a recent study offers a slightly different perspective. The study, which involved observing the behavior of Virginia and other motorists, suggested that those who used a hands-free device while talking on their phones actually were less likely to be involved in an accident.