A case of first impression is one the courts of the Commonwealth have not decided before. There is no prior Virginia case to point to, which means the argument has to be built rather than cited — and whichever way it goes, it becomes the rule for everyone who comes after.
Cloyd Allen Smith argued and won one, within his first year of practicing trust and estate litigation — Boyle v. Anderson, 301 Va. 52, 871 S.E.2d 226 (2022), decided 14 April 2022, in which he appeared for the appellee.
What was decided
Trust instruments increasingly contain arbitration clauses. A trustee facing a challenge would rather answer it privately, before a paid arbitrator, than publicly before a judge. The question was whether a trust counts as a contract — because arbitration statutes enforce contracts.
The Court held it does not. A trust is not a contract enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act or the Virginia Uniform Arbitration Act. A beneficiary in Virginia cannot be pushed out of court by a clause in a document they never signed.
Why an appellate record matters to a client
It signals that a lawyer preserves issues correctly at trial — appellate courts only reach questions that were properly raised below. And it changes the arithmetic for an opponent, who can no longer assume that losing at trial simply starts a war of attrition the firm cannot afford.
Boyle v. Anderson, 301 Va. 52, 871 S.E.2d 226 (2022), Record No. 210382, decided 14 April 2022. Reported by Virginia Lawyers Weekly, and later carried nationally by EIN Presswire and the National Law Review. See the fiduciary practice →