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COMMERCIAL LITIGATION
Owning commercial real estate can be a difficult business, especially with non paying litigious tenants determined to stay in possession of spaces they can no longer afford.
When a corporate restaurant tenant that was chronically behind in its rent commenced a dilatory lawsuit and obtained a temporary restraining order preventing the Landlord from continuing its efforts at rent collection, the owner faced the prospect of a protracted occupancy by a deadbeat tenant who then tried to force an assignment of its lease to a third party that the Landlord had not approved.
Hollander and Company LLC was brought into the case, arranged for the court to impose conditions on further stays that the Tenant was not able to meet, secured a money judgment against the Tenant, and when the tenant further delayed by filing a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy petition, persuaded the Bankruptcy Judge to allow the owner to evict the tenant, have a trustee liquidate the tenant’s assets, and then successfully obtained a six figure settlement against the defunct tenant’s guarantors.
Even better, once the space was returned to the owner, Hollander and Company LLC negotiated a favorable commercial retail lease with a new restaurant tenant at a substantially higher rent with no brokerage commission.
INTERNET LAW
A well known maker of bedroom furnishings lost its “bedroom.com” Internet domain name to someone who impersonated the company’s administrative contact and repeatedly transferred the name between different registrars in order to hide their tracks while using the domain name for a pornography website. The company unsuccessfully tried for months to recover its domain name by appealing to the registrar, with whom the name was originally registered.
Being told by other law firms that efforts to recover the domain name would cost tens of thousands of dollars, Hollander and Company LLC used innovative web searching techniques and a thorough understanding of domain name registration cancellation policies to track down the domain name thief’s whereabouts, prove the true nature of its activities, and worked with three different registrars to obtain cancellation of the fraudulent registration and return of the domain name to its rightful owner.
Now, the legitimate owners of bedroom.com can sleep better at night knowing their products get the web exposure they deserve.
TRADEMARKS
The largest luxury coop complex in Queens, New York had a big problem. Despite years of developing good will and a common law trademark in its name, an expensive tri-state marketing campaign was jeopardized when the Coop learned that an ambitious real estate broker had registered the Coop’s as her domain name across virtually all top level domains and used it to redirect unsuspecting web browsers to her own personal website promoting her own services in a manner falsely giving the impression that she was affiliated with the Coop.
When this prevented the Coop from establishing its web presence and threatened to take away sales leads from the Coop’s designated sales agent, Hollander and Company LLC defeated one of the largest law firms in New York City in a Uniform Dispute Resolution Arbitration and secured the transfer of all of the disputed domain names back to the Coop, so that web browsers seeking information about the Coop could again find it by its rightful name.
REAL ESTATE
A sponsor of unsold coop apartments in Manhattan entered into a contract to sell a unit and its stock to an out of state buyer under a contract giving the proposed buyer a mortgage contingency, meaning that the buyer could cancel the contract if she could not obtain a mortgage despite diligent efforts to do so.
When the buyer sought to cancel on this ground after several months, Hollander and Company LLC was asked to investigate the genuineness of the buyer’s efforts to get a loan and, when it became clear that the only efforts that were made to get the loan did not meet the requirements of the contract, the firm made application to the New York State Attorney General’s office for permission for the Sponsor to retain the down payment as liquidated damages.
Despite intense opposition from the Buyer’s counsel, the Attorney General sided with Hollander and Company LLC’s contract interpretation, allowing the Sponsor to retain the deposit in the face of the Buyer’s cancellation of the contract. As a result, the Sponsor was compensated for its having had the unit off the sales market and was able to resell the unit at a higher price shortly thereafter.
COMMERCIAL MATTERS
When members of a business that held numerous properties under the names of various limited liability companies discovered that one of them was falsifying records and official documents, entering into unauthorized transactions, and making improper personal loans for his own benefit, the need for that member’s prompt removal from all affected companies was obvious. The problem was the member was one of the managing members in almost all the companies and that the operating agreements in all the companies differed, not having been prepared in a consistent manner by previous attorneys.
Hollander and Company LLC performed a thorough analysis of the varying removal requirements of the different affected companies, prepared all necessary resolutions needed to effectuate the ouster of the objectionable member, and helped negotiate and document a settlement agreement that indemnified the remaining members for any damages and returned full ownership of the limited liability companies to the remaining members.
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