Over a year ago, I posted about Bison Advisors v. Kessler, et al., focusing on a garden-variety discovery dispute which I characterized as slightly demeaning to the lives and livelihoods of civil litigators — deadlocked impasse as to whether a deposition should be allowed to go for 2 hours or 7 hours. The two sides fought over this for hours over weeks, incurring thousands of dollars in legal fees, briefing and then arguing before U.S. Mag. Judge Steven E. Rau (D. Minn.). Hours and thousands of dollars later, Judge Rau set the time limit to 3.5 hours. Worth every penny, right?
Fast forward through 413 docket entries in the case since it was filed on August 7, 2014 and tomorrow the case was set for a jury trial before Sr. U.S. District Court Judge David S. Doty (D. Minn.).
The facts of this contentious and complex case in a compact nutshell: a group of people teamed up to engage in stock trading, exploring a strategy called “pairs trading,” in which investors track two stocks whose prices are correlated (maybe a jet engine manufacturer and an aviation controls manufacturer, for instance). The pairs trading investors track when the share prices of the trading pairs diverge, buying the underperforming stock, selling the overperforming stock, betting that, over time, they will return to their historical correlation. Sound brilliant to you? Me neither but what do we know? Apparently, some version of the strategy has worked well enough to hire some of the best lawyers in Minnesota to slug it out for a few years as to whether some of the team stole the idea from others on the team for the purpose of benefiting their competing business.
Here-linked is Plaintiff’s side of the story from its “statement of the case.” I would like to post Defendants’ side, as well, but they filed their statement of the case under seal. This is ironic because Plaintiff charged Defendants with misappropriation of trade secrets. One might have thought the Plaintiff would have been the more secretive of the two in their pretrial filings.
The lawyers for both sides in this case, Fox Rothschild (Jeff Bouslog, Kathy Kimmel) for the Plaintiffs and Maslon (Bill Pentelovitch, Haley Shaffer) for the Defendants, are truly preeminent Minnesota civil litigators. This would have been a great trial for aspiring civil litigators to watch and learn from some of the best. But after 2+ years of the epic civil litigation blood-letting, the case settled on August 25, five days before the scheduled trial but not before a veritable CAT 5 storm of pretrial filings that had to have resulted in six figures of fees by themselves…
