Some years ago, we told the war story of a jury trial on the meaning of “operates via buoyancy,” where the two sides battled for a few weeks to persuade the jury over their respective views on the meaning of the word, “buoyancy.” After all that, it became apparent from a note sent out by […]

Updated post (February 8, 2019): One fertile patch for malpractice claims are financial transactions and a lawyer’s undisclosed conflicts of interest or breaches of fiduciary duties (the duty of loyalty, candor, confidentiality). These are common pinch-points because transactional lawyers are, in an important sense, in between parties as much as they are on one side or […]

  The Judge ruled against the motion in limine you brought before trial.  You didn’t raise that in a new trial motion.  May you challenge the ruling on appeal?  In Bhakta, the Minnesota Court of Appeals said, “no.”  The Minnesota Supreme Court disagreed.  In a new decision in the case, the Minnesota Supreme Court said, […]

For those of our readers who are unfamiliar with texting/Twitter acronyms/abbreviations, TIL = “Today I learned [about]….” We recently encountered this objection to an interrogatory that we had not seen before: [I]t is an impermissible “blockbuster” interrogatory which seeks to elicit every fact related to the action in one interrogatory. See Hilt v. SFC, Inc., […]

Update (January 30, 2019): In the dispute about “susceptor food packaging” or “SFP,” described below, Plaintiff Inline Packaging (“Inline”) appears to have gotten a butt-kicking (pending appeal) (link is to the U.S. District Court’s grant of the summary judgment motion of Defendant Graphic Packaging International “Graphic”). Now Graphic seeks $304,930.89 in costs, the vast bulk of […]

From the proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law (“FOFCOL”) of St. Cloud State University (SCSU) after a trial before Chief Judge John R. Tunheim of the U.S. District Court (D. Minn.), we  learn that SCSU appears to be a struggling educational institution. As a result of the decline in enrollment and accompanying revenues, […]

So held the Minnesota Supreme Court this week. And we think that most people would agree that “going to a bar” is not synonymous with “getting into a fist-fight.” Bars ≠ fighting arenas. On the other hand, we all know what a “bar fight” is. In other words, although bars ≠ fighting arenas, fights in bars are […]

The recent denial of summary judgment sought by United Parcel Service (UPS) in a case brought on behalf of Mr. Jeffrey Pagenkopf is interesting on many levels. In no particular order, we first note that the Court’s memorandum sets out the means by which UPS selects drivers and trains them. The process is intensive and […]

Normally, it is large institutions (banks, retailers, manufacturers, etc.) who seek to hold “little people” (customers, individual consumers, small businesses) to contracts. From time to time, however, the tables are turned as they are in Bixby et al. v. Lifespace Communities, Inc., d/b/a Friendship Village of Bloomington (“Lifespace”), pending in U.S. District Court before Chief Judge […]

“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.”  Martin Luther King, Jr.