Formerly the assistant state attorney for the Dade County State Attorney’s Office in Miami, Florida, Rick Hutchison now serves as an equity partner at Holland & Knight LLP in West Palm Beach. In conjunction with his professional role, Rick Hutchison has also leveraged his legal experience to teach trial and deposition skills at the National Institute for Trial Advocacy (NITA) for almost 20 years.The National Institute for Trial Advocacy is a Boulder, Colorado-based nonprofit organization that offers continuing legal education opportunities to law professionals in the United States. NITA’s core mission is to provide lawyers with the training they need to deliver effective and ethical advocacy to clients in support of a fair and competent justice system.Continuing education students have access to classes covering a wide range of legal subjects, including writing briefs, filing motions, examining witnesses, and building trial skills. Some classes can be accessed in an online format, while others are available on a state-by-state basis at various local settings such as universities, courthouses, and resort conferences.
Rick Hutchison has maintained a position as equity partner at law firm Holland & Knight LLP for over 15 years. In his work, Rick Hutchison focuses on the legal areas of contract and business torts litigation. Business torts litigation is a legal discipline centered on misconduct or damages done to intangible assets held by a company, rather than to an individual or a property involved with a business. These intangible assets include things like intellectual property, business opportunities, or client relationships. Because of this, much of the litigation surrounding business torts is oriented toward the future, and requires legal professionals to build complex cases to recoup future and projected losses, rather than losses that have already been experienced.Though business torts litigation covers a wide range of subjects, two of the most common examples are unfair competition and disparagement suits. In terms of commercial law, unfair competition lawsuits are the result of unjust or noncompetitive practices that negatively impact the ability of a company to do business, while disparagement refers to any action that facilitates the spread of negative information that discourages interaction with a company.
