To preface this post, I do not suspect the previous owner of Orange Legal of anything untoward at this time. Some in our field disagree with selling small businesses out to large national firms, and I understand why, but I am personally ambivalent to the sole act of “selling out.” The only time that I grilled someone for “selling” was Rick Levy, and that was because he lied to me.
I previously explained that BlueLedge appeared to be using CourtReporterEDU to siphon stenography students to Ed 2 Go and digital court reporting. This was followed by explaining the connections or general friendliness among BlueLedge, Veritext, and Stenograph.
BlueLedge was voluntarily dissolved in 2019 even though it still appears to be in operation. Its address? 101 E Kennedy.
Orange Legal has the same address.
So this strengthens the evidence that Veritext and BlueLedge are close.
As previously posted, BlueLedge was voluntarily dissolved in 2019. Coincidentally, after over 30 years of keeping its regular filings, Orange Legal was administratively dissolved in 2020*. It apparently failed to file its annual report. Dissolution is not a permanent thing. Corporations can remedy that and become “active” again.
But the dissolution issue is not entirely without its problems. According to various sources online, contrary to my previous belief that inactive corporations should not be doing business in a state, it appears that dissolved or inactive corporations may generally continue to operate. It is notable that liability may spill over to corporate officers of inactive corporations and that corporations that are inactive may not be able to defend themselves in court.
In short, the dissolution angle does not appear to be the game changer I thought it was. It’s still pretty interesting and puts any dissolved company that’s breaking the law at a serious disadvantage. For example, in a state like mine, a consumer can bring a deceptive business practice claim. If a consumer were to do that against an inactive corporation, it is apparent the corporation would have to solve the dissolution before it could even begin to defend itself in court. And in New York, where lawyers can cost $400 an hour, that’s a lot of money.
Addendum:
Shortly after release of this post, a reader pointed out Benjamin Jaffe of BlueLedge worked for Orange Legal.
Addendum:
*On 11/28/21, well after publishing, I realized that the holding company for Orange Legal came up in place of Orange Legal and I have now added images for both entries. Note that my original line about when the dissolution took place may be off, but the images of the publicly-available info are exactly what I saw.