Back in January, Minnesota Litigator covered the Loparex v. MPI discovery dispute in which MPI sought third-party discovery from Briggs & Morgan, seeking discovery responses served by MPI in a Minnesota lawsuit, in connection with Loparex’s litigation against MPI in federal court in Indiana.
MPI’s response was that Loparex was seeking documents in Minnesota that either Loparex already had or documents that were completely unrelated to its claims against MPI. Consequently, United States Magistrate Judge S.R. Nelson (D. Minn.), in response to Loparex’s motion to compel issued an order granting the motion in part and denying the motion in part (essentially ordering the production of relevant documents and sparing respondent the obligation of producing irrelevant documents). MPI’s not happy with Loparex’s responses to the Court’s order.
Now MPI has moved for sanctions against Loparex and its legal counsel. Loparex, in response, has moved to strike.
U.S. District Court Judge Patrick Schiltz (D. Minn.) for some time has emphasized to Minnesota civil litigators that “there is no such thing as a motion to strike.”
To get to the bottom of disputes such as this one takes more time than Minnesota Litigator has to spare. A similar sense that time would be better spent on other matters undoubtedly will be shared by the Court itself. If the Court reaches a firm conviction that one side or the other has made the fairly simple task of third-party discovery a costly morass, the results for whomever that would be could be nasty.