In one of the last opinions written by now former-Supreme Court Justice Ketchum, I can announce that we just won an important real estate case before the WV Supreme Court

The newly-indicted justice actually didn’t vote, but we recently a won a big case.  It was a case we had tried to a jury, and won.  Months down the road, the trial judge threw out the verdict and tried to take it away from us.  But we appealed, and won.  The verdict has been reinstated.

You can read the opinion here.

McInarnay et al. v. Hall, et al.

It actually created some new law in West Virginia:

(Basically, a trial lawyer needs to complain about insufficiency of the evidence before the case goes to a jury, not after.  If you roll the dice and lose, you can’t claim afterwards that the jury didn’t have enough evidence.)

Under the WEST VIRGINIA RULES OF CIVIL PROCEDURE [1998], when a party has failed during a jury trial to make a motion for judgment as a matter of law under Rule 50(a) challenging the sufficiency of the evidence, that party has waived the right to mount any post-trial attack on the sufficiency of the evidence under Rule

50(b). Additionally, if the party moves for a new trial under Rule 59 and attempts to challenge the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the verdict, then the scope of review of the motion is confined to whether there was any evidence to support the jury’s verdict, irrespective of its sufficiency, and which, if not addressed by the court, would result in a manifest miscarriage of justice.

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