To get into the latest round of Virginia Supreme Court decisions, start with the court's synopsis page and Steve Emmert's website.
I must confess that the most interesting case to me so far is the mechanic's lien issue in Britt Construction, Inc. v. Magazzine Clean, LLC, where the Court held Va. Code § 43-4 "requires that a general contractor, as a condition of perfecting a mechanic’s lien, contemporaneously file with the memorandum of lien a 'certification' that a copy of the memorandum has been mailed to the property owner."
One of the interesting things about is to eliminate some of the high-stakes ambiguity about how to perfect a mechanic's lien, the General Assembly has codified a "safe harbor" form, which was was nonetheless relegated to this footnote in the Court's opinion:
"The absence of any reference to a certification of mailing in the 'safe harbor' form of Code § 43-5 does not affect our analysis of Code § 43-4. That form addresses only the sufficiency of a memorandum of lien and affidavit filed under Code § 43-4. Also, the 'safe harbor' forms of Code §§ 43-8 and –10 are not relevant to the issue before us because they pertain to subcontractors and to persons furnishing labor or materials to a subcontractor and, thus, do not affect the unambiguous requirements imposed on a general contractor by Code § 43-4."
Unless my memory is mistaken, I've seen a circuit court rule the other way on the issue of this appeal.
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