Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(6) implements 28 U.S.C. §2107(c), permitting the District Court to reopen and extend the time within which an appeal may be filed under certain limited circumstances. If the District Judge grants the putative appellant’s motion, the ‛district court may reopen the time to file an appeal for a period of 14 days after the ...

The plaintiff in Fairfax Fin. Holdings Ltd. v. S.A.C. Capital Mgmt., LLC, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 39214 (D. N.J. May 15, 2007), filed a state RICO action with federal predicates. The defendants removed, arguing that ‛arising under“ jurisdiction existed under Grable & Sons Metal Prods. v. Darue Eng'g & Mfg., 545 U.S. 308 (2005), due to the plaintiff� ...

Download associated file: Final Evidence Rule 502.pdf  On June 11, the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure unanimously approved Proposed Federal Rule of Evidence 502 (Attorney-Client Privilege and Work Product; Limitations on Waiver). The proposal, as a ...

India and the United States are signatories to the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (implemented at 9 U.S.C. § 201 ff.). After the Indian defendant won an international arbitration against the American plaintiff in London, the U.S. party sued to block enforcement in Detroit federal court. Among other things, the U ...

Just how extensively does Bell Atlantic (see our post of May 27, 2007) change the law of notice pleading? In a second pleading opinion issued per curiam last week in a pro se prisoner case, Erickson v. Pardus, 2007 WL 1582936 (U.S. June 4, 2007), the Supreme Court sounded a permissive chord. In his complaint, the prisoner plaintiff alleged th ...

The defendant in Disability Rights Council v. Washington Metropolitan Transit Auth., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 39605 (D.D.C. June 1, 2007), failed to instruct employees to retain potentially responsive emails. No litigation hold was put into effect until more than two years after the litigation commenced. Until the hold was put into effect, emails were automati ...

The parties in Williams v. Taser Int’l, Inc., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 40280 (N.D. Ga. June 4, 2007), like the parties in many other cases, could not agree on an email database search protocol. Plaintiffs wanted to be present at the corporate defendant’s facilities, looking at the screen, and provide search requests in real time to the IT professional actua ...

Under Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(a)(2)(B), an expert must include in his or her report not only ‛a complete statement of all opinions“ but also ‛the data or other information considered by the witness in forming the opinions.“ The critical word is ‛considered.“ As noted in the posting of January 8, 2007, the Sixth Circuit has largely ended the debate a ...

In contrast to Nnebe v. Daus, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 32981 (S.D.N.Y. May 3, 2007) (discussed in the posting dated May 25, 2007), the opinion in C.T. v. Liberal School District, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 38177 (D. Kan. May 24, 2007), declined to find a waiver despite an inadequate privilege log. Magistrate Judge K. Gary Sebelius concluded that: ‛While th ...

In the 1970 amendments to Fed.R.Civ.P. 37, the scope of Rule 37(b)(2) (discovery sanctions) was substantially broadened. Among other things, the Rule was extended to cover disobedience to any order ‛to provide or permit discovery,'' including orders issued under Rules 37(a) (motions to compel discovery), 35 (requiring a physical or mental examination) or 26(c) (p ...