Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Judge Mark V. Holmes is quoting Letters from a Stoic, and he sure needs a stoical disposition to deal with the discovery antics of both sides in Ardan Holdings, LLC, Ardan Investors, LLC, Tax Matters Partner. Docket No. 17483-21, filed 1/26/24. This is a highest-and-best-use scrap in a Dixieland Boondockery, mining variation.

Case is on for trial next month in Columbia, SC, the parties having taken Judge Holmes’s suggestion from my blogpost “Endangered Species,” 9/6/23.

I’m not going to paraphrase or digest the thirteen (count ’em, thirteen) pages Judge Holmes needs to deal with the barrage and counterbattery fire of admissions, documents, insufficiencies, sufficiencies, and sanctions.

I’ll just observe that discovery has gotten completely out of hand; from the play-nice described in my blogpost above-cited, the parties have gotten “crabbed,” “persnickety,” “evasive under the circumstances,” and have engaged in piling on in interrogatories to dodge the 25-question limit of Rule 71(a). Courts have had problems trying to find a formula to decide what is a discrete subpart of an interrogatory, so Judge Holmes has to parse each one, and toss whatever he finds over the limit.

I’ll further observe that just because one partner in the deal has separate counsel from counsel to the (box-checked) partnership, that’s no excuse for counsel for the partnership not to make reasonable inquiry of that partner as to what they did with the realty before they contributed  it to the partnership.

True discovery geeks can read the rest for themselves.

Judge Holmes finally calls a halt to these shenanigans.

“Petitioner filed another pretrial motion this Tuesday to argue some more about its Rule 91(f) motion. The Court must observe that the parties in this case have not been litigating the pretrial phase of this case entirely in the informal, reasonable, and cost-efficient way our rules and customs encourage. We can rule on this motion by observing that it is not provided for in the pretrial order that set deadlines in this case with an eye to making sure it can be tried on time late next month. ‘When you are travelling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless.’ Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic 37 (Richard Mott Gummere trans., 2016).” Order, at p. 12.