Minnesota Litigator
News & Commentary
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Motion for Sanctions Denied (Sort Of)
Update (February 27, 2019): Fitting with an “emergency” motion, U.S. Mag. Judge David Schultz lost no time in ruling on the emergency motion for sanctions, discussed below. Strictly speaking, he denied the motion but, really, he found that “sanctions are appropriate in this instance” but he denied the requested relief, granting alternative and less severe […]
“I’m not going to give nobody anything.”
It is gratifying when a person appears to take the position that he can defy legal obligations and our court system puts him in his place. Mr. Nasser Kazeminy, a highly successful business person, seems to have found himself in this situation in connection with his son’s divorce proceedings. Mr. Nasser Kazeminy was required to […]
Fighting about Fighting: Gettings One’s Adversary to Pay One’s Expert’s Fees…
The pathetic thing about this week’s ruling that Plaintiff Wing does not have to pay Defendant Tricam’s claimed expert witness fees is that the two sides had been negotiating their disagreement as to responsibility for the fees and they were just $500 apart. Tricam could have accepted $500 less than it demanded from Wing. Instead, […]
Judges, Juries, and Inconsistent Verdicts
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 […]
Atarax: Transactional Intrigue & Professional Malpractice?
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 […]
Snipping away at Sauter
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, […]
TIL: “Blockbuster Interrogatory”
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., […]
A Short Note on a Huge Problem: E-Discovery & Taxable Costs
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 […]
A Title IX Challenge to St. Cloud State’s Womens’ Sports Program
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, […]
“[P]atronage of bars is not — and should not be — a contact sport.”
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 […]