LAS VEGAS, April 8, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Answering a legal question that had been pending in Nevada for over 2 years, the Nevada Supreme Court on March 26, 2009 held that design professionals who provide services in connection with commercial property development cannot be sued for negligence where the alleged damages are purely financial. The ruling aligns Nevada with a growing number of states that, in recent years, have extended the protection of the economic loss doctrine to design professionals, allowing them the same legal benefits that protect construction contractors, product manufacturers and other business entities involved in litigation. The effects of this decision will be limitation of the nature and, potentially, the volume, of professional negligence claims asserted against licensed design professionals in Nevada.
Morris Polich & Purdy LLP represented major design professional groups appearing as amicus curiae in Terracon Consultants Western, Inc. v. Mandalay Bay Resort Group, where Mandalay claimed over $50,000,000 in property damage and lost revenue when, during and after the completion of construction, the hotel began to experience subsidence and movement.
The decision has been widely anticipated since the inception of the dispute in 1996, and especially since its being argued in February, 2008. "Over the last ten-plus years, architecture and engineering firms have been joined into lawsuits and have had claims asserted against them with little factual support, solely as a means of extracting settlement funds from them as an offset against huge legal expense fees," says Nicholas M. Wieczorek of Morris Polich & Purdy's Las Vegas office, who participated in the drafting of the "friend-of-the-court" brief on behalf of the monitoring organizations. "This decision will curtail many of the 'shake-down' abuses of construction litigation which have taken place over the past many years, and which have impacted the financial health of numerous design professional companies."
Additional information regarding the background and impact of the Terracon decision can be found in the article at the following link: www.mpplaw.com/pdf/Article_NevadaBarsNegligenceClaims.pdf
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