McNeil v. Child Nutrition Services

The Act provides plaintiff receive interest on the award "from the date of the initial hearing", but the hearing proper actually lasted from the date when the Deputy Commissioner heard the lay witnesses, November 15, 1994, until the record was closed on February 6, 1995. N.C.G.S. §§ 97-86.2 and 97-84. In the past, my practice has been to order interest paid from the date the record closed, because that conforms most logically with a purpose of the statute — to discourage "frivolous appeals" — since defendants' knowledge of the merits of their case is changed at the hearing stage only by the…