What is Commercial Litigation?

Attorney Roy Oppenheim demystifies the term “commercial litigation,” highlighting various scenarios such as disputes between businesses, service quality concerns, issues with overseas vendors, partner disagreements, and complications in business transactions. He also underscores the importance of cost-effective resolution methods, advocating for litigation only when absolutely necessary.

Hi, this is Attorney Roy Oppenheim from Oppenheim Law. A lot of times people say, you know, “What is commercial litigation? What does that really mean?” And it means different things to different people. But I’ll tell you what it means to me. I mean, when you’re involved in commercial litigation, you’re involved with two parties. They’re not involved in a family dispute, they’re not necessarily involved in their real estate dispute, they’re not involved in a criminal matter. They’re involved with some business disputes, some business matter. And it could be you as a purchaser, not necessarily as a consumer, but you as a purchaser as a business buying something from another business and not getting the value that you expected. Either the shipment never came, either the shipment didn’t meet your specification, or, you know, the shipment came in late and thus it missed the value that you had. And so that’s one form of commercial litigation.

Another form of commercial litigation is where you hire a company to provide a service and the services that they provide are substandard and don’t meet the specifications. It could be software development, it could be a website development, it could be furniture that was being constructed. It could be millions of different things, but those are typically the kinds of issues that you have in commercial litigation. And then sometimes you have litigation with overseas vendors, a manufacturer who’s making products and the products that they’re making aren’t to specification. And they get stuck at the port, and who’s responsible, or they get damaged in shipping. And then you got insurance issues. A lot of times commercial litigation involves insurance because a lot of the losses are sometimes insured. So a lot of times you’re dealing with insurance claims. So those are the types of commercial litigation that come to mind for me.

But other types of commercial litigation may be where you have a partner and there’s a dispute on your relationship with that partner in terms of how that relationship exists, who makes decisions, how much each is getting paid, compensation, distributions, tax matters, all kinds of issues that could be associated with the partnership. Also, when you’re buying or selling a business, that’s typically a lot of commercial litigation gets involved. You expected one thing and you got something else. And so whether you were selling a business or you were buying a business, either way, you may feel that you got the short end of the stick for some reason and that too would be a form of commercial litigation. So, that’s typically what commercial litigation means and we’ve been doing it for years.

We like to try and resolve these matters when we can, but when we can’t, you have to go to court and you have to do what you gotta do. Litigation’s expensive and so we like to avoid it. We like to make sure that the matter in controversy, the amount that we’re fighting over will certainly exceed the legal fees. I mean, it’s just terrible when the legal fees are more than what we’re fighting over because then that means that this is obviously a matter of principle and not necessarily a matter of just commerce. But sometimes, you know, someone wants to teach someone a lesson or someone just feels so emotionally strong about their feelings that they don’t care about the legal fee. But as an attorney and as an officer of the court, we really feel that it’s best when we can try and resolve these matters, and where the legal fees aren’t the main thrust of the problem. Anyway, call me if you have any questions.