The Nevada Supreme Court held that NRS 52.325 is not the exclusive route for authenticating medical records and ordered a new personal-injury trial after key records and medical-lien evidence were excluded.
The Nevada Supreme Court held that requiring prosecutorial consent to waive a criminal jury trial does not violate separation of powers.
The Nevada Supreme Court, en banc, overruled Capriati Construction Corp. v. Yahyavi and held that NRCP 68 attorney fee awards in contingency cases must reflect only the value of work performed after the offer of judgment was served — not the entire contingency fee — because fees are incurred as work is performed, not at the time of judgment. The court reversed an $818,047 award covering a 40 percent contingency fee in a case where the offer was served just 24 days before trial, four years into litigation.
The Nevada Supreme Court vacated and remanded with instructions to dismiss, holding en banc that while a party may challenge a district court’s jurisdiction over a first petition for judicial review in a subsequent NAPA petition, the subsequent petition must itself strictly comply with NRS 233B.130(2)(a) by naming all parties of record. Rocha’s second petition, which named DHHS but not the Personnel Commission, was jurisdictionally defective from the outset, and a belated amendment could not cure the defect.
The Nevada Supreme Court reversed Allen’s convictions for sexual assault on a minor, holding en banc that a district court abused its discretion in finding A.S.’s juvenile records of a nearly identical prior sexual offense irrelevant to Allen’s alternative-suspect defense. The court found the error was not harmless where it foreclosed pretrial investigation, terminated the admissibility inquiry, the jury independently indicated interest in the alternative suspect, and the State exploited the exclusion to elicit misleading testimony.
The Nevada Supreme Court reversed a 43 percent markup on an attorney fee award under NRS 22.100(3), holding that for a paying client with private counsel at a freely negotiated hourly rate, the billed rate presumptively establishes the market rate for lodestar calculations. A district court may award a higher rate only when the applicant demonstrates the firm discounted its rates for pro bono or public-interest representation — a finding that the firm “could have charged more” is insufficient.