Disclaimer

March 16, 2020

To our clients:

North Carolina has declared a state of emergency in its efforts to stem the spread of COVID-19. The Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court has canceled most of the state’s courts for the next thirty days. We want you to know what that means for your matter and for our office.

  • We are still working, are still available to speak with you and are still handling your matter. While we are working, to help stop the spread of COVID-19, we will be taking steps to minimize exposure potential for you as well as for us. To do that, we will schedule all meetings as telephone conferences including all initial client consultations and send documents electronically for review unless we specifically need you to execute documents before a notary. For many of you, this will not be a change and we hope that whether we work in our office or remotely, you will not be inconvenienced.
  • For any matter scheduled to be heard in court, a new court date will be scheduled by our clerk’s office or by us. We will notify you when a new court date is set.
  • Documents still can and must be filed timely. Therefore if you have an estate accounting to file or an answer due in a civil matter, those documents are still due on the date we have already given to you or at the time we will give to you. All documents that are to be provided either to us or to an opposing party through the discovery process are still due.
  • For emergency matters only, we can still ask a judge for relief.  Therefore if you were to need help for an emergency, the courts are still available. However, we have been instructed to limit our time in court and only to seek relief if absolutely necessary. The memo from the Chief Justice which accompanied her order closing courts gave us this instruction “… the spirit of my order is to drastically reduce the foot traffic in all of our courthouses across the state. … Put simply, it cannot be business as usual for our court system. Non-essential court functions that cannot be accomplished through the use of remote technology must be postponed.”
  • Here is the link from the North Carolina Supreme Court if you would like to read the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court’s order for further information: https://www.nccourts.gov/assets/news-uploads/COVID-19-13-March-2020-7A-39%28b%29%282%29-Order_0.pdf?sCe0Me_YaLJBPjYl4doVvi4r_4Sm1Zbn=.
  • To minimize disruptions and continue to serve you as planned, we are adopting the following plan for the next thirty days:
    1. As stated above, only telephone meetings except for matters which require execution of documents before our notary. For most documents, we will give you the option of coming here or of making use a notary more convenient to you.
    2. If you need to make a Last Will and Testament, we are here to help you with that process. However, please understand that a written attested will must be signed in the presence of two witnesses and before a notary public. Therefore, your exposure to a minimum of three other people is required as is their exposure to you. The signing can be at our office, or we can come to your home. Please call us, and we will discuss the safest and best approach for you and us.
    3. At any that you have any health concerns, please call us to set a telephone meeting or to change any appointment you have until you feel you are able to travel to us.
    4. While we understand that school is not in session in North Carolina for the next two weeks it is important that if you have to come to our office that you do not bring anyone else with you. Minimizing exposure is the key to slowing disease progression so if you have to come in, do not bring children, other family members or friends with you to your appointment.

We are trying to keep you and everyone else safe while continuing to serve your needs.  Please be patient with us if it takes longer to reach us or to hear back from us during these unusual times.

If you have any questions, your best option is to reach us through email or to leave a message in our voicemail.  Our response times are going to go up but we will endeavor to reach you as soon as is possible.

Thank you,

The attorneys and staff of Stroud and Panetti, P.C.

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT use the supplied e-mail interface to send any privileged or confidential information. Internet messages can be intercepted. Further, we cannot agree to maintain the confidentiality of information that we receive outside of an attorney-client relationship.

No communication between you and Stroud & Panetti, PC, via this Web site should be interpreted as establishing an attorney-client relationship. Stroud & Panetti, PC must observe certain formalities before agreeing to represent anyone in a particular matter. You are not and do not become a client of the firm until a member of the firm has agreed to represent you, and our required fees have been paid.

No attorney-client relationship will be formed by sending an e-mail and you should not transmit confidential information. If you are contacting us about potential representation, please limit the initial message to your name, the names of the other persons or entities involved, and a brief description of the type of case or matter. By clicking “I have read the Disclaimer” on our email form, you further agree that our review of any information you transmit to us will not preclude our firm from representing a party directly adverse to you and from using this information, even if the information is confidential.

Our duties to our existing and former clients require us, before assuming any new matters, to determine whether or not we may represent or advise you in light of any actual or potential conflicts with our existing or former clients or duties that the firm may owe. Until those prerequisites are completed, you should not consider any communications with us by letter, facsimile transmission, telephone, Internet, e-mail or otherwise as privileged or confidential.

Keith Stroud and Eleanor Panetti are licensed to practice law in the State of North Carolina. While the content found in the https://stroudandpanetti.com website is meant to be informative, it is not legal advice and its intended relevancy is only to matters that fall under the purview of North Carolina law.

Stroud & Panetti, PC, values the privacy of its clients and website viewers. Personal information, including but not limited to any of the following personal information that may be made available to the lawyer or firm when browsing or navigating the site shall be kept confidential, except as specifically noted in the Disclaimer above:

  • First and last name
  • Company, home, postal or other physical address
  • Other contact information, for example, telephone number, fax number, email address, and other similar information
  • Title or position in a company or an organization
  • Occupation
  • Industry
  • Personal interests
  • Any other information needed to provide a service you requested.

Examples of scenarios where our visitors provide their personal information include, but may not be limited, to:

  • Emailing, calling or communicating with the lawyer or law firm.
  • Posting a question or comment through the site.
  • Requesting literature.
  • Registering to attend a seminar or any event.
  • Participating in an online survey or utilizing our bankruptcy questionnaire.
  • Requesting inclusion in an email or other mailing list.
  • Submitting an entry for a contest or other promotions.
  • Logging in to the site, thus requiring a username and/or a password.
  • Any other business-related reason.

Stroud & Panetti, PC provides you the opportunity to agree or decline to give your personal information via the Internet. Stroud & Panetti, PC will inform you of the purpose for the collection and does not intend to transfer your personal information to third parties without your consent, except under the limited conditions described under the discussion entitled “Information Sharing and Disclosure” below. If you choose to provide us with your personal information, we may transfer that information, within the law firm or to a third party service provider as necessary.

Stroud & Panetti, PC may collect domain information to enable us to analyze how our visitors use this site. This data enables us to become more familiar with which people visit our site, how often they visit, and what parts of the site they visit most often. The lawyer or firm uses this information to improve its Web-based offerings. This information is collected automatically and requires no action on your part.

We collect information through this web site at several points. We collect the following information about primary visitors: referring domain, date of access, pages visited, and other statistical data. We collect this information through clickstream tracking, automatic logging files, Google Analytics and so on. The information is collected automatically and no user input is required.

At any point in time, pages on this site may use “cookies” – small files that the site places on your hard drive for identification purposes. A cookie file can contain information such as a user ID to track the pages visited, but the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. These files are used for site registration and customization the next time you visit us.

Some parts of the site may also use cookies to track user traffic patterns. This may be done in order to determine the usefulness of our Web site information to our users and to see how effective our navigational structure is in helping users reach that information. Please note that cookies cannot read data off of your hard drive. Your Web browser may allow you to be notified when you are receiving a cookie, giving you the choice to accept it or not. If you prefer not to receive cookies while browsing our web site, you can set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies and refuse the cookie when your browser alerts you to its presence. You can also refuse all cookies by turning them off in your browser. By not accepting cookies, some pages may not fully function and you may not be able to access certain information on this site.

Your personal information is never shared outside the Stroud & Panetti, PC firm without your permission, except under conditions listed below:

  • Consenting to share your information to a third party service provider working on our behalf to serve you.
  • Requiring us to provide you with a product or service.

Stroud & Panetti, PC must and will disclose your personal information, if required to do so by law or court order (non-exhaustive examples of legally required disclosures are disclosures to prevent a future crime or to report child abuse).

Stroud & Panetti, PC strives to protect your personal information. However, we urge you to take every precaution to protect your personal data when you are on the Internet. Change your passwords often, use a combination of
letters, symbols and numbers.

Children under 13 years old are not the target audience for our Web site. To protect their privacy, Stroud & Panetti, PC prohibits the solicitation of personal information from these children.

This site may contain links to other sites. Stroud & Panetti, PC does not share your personal information with those Web sites and is not responsible for their privacy practices. We encourage you to learn about the privacy policies of those companies.

Stroud & Panetti, PC reserves the right to change, modify or update this policy at any time without notice. Any substantial changes in the way we use your personal information will be posted on this site.

If you have questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy, please email us at the contact information on the site.