It’s Friday, so enough already.  Autumn weather has already come to our Minor Outlying Island. Time for cocoa and a brief listen to Les Feuilles Mortes.

Except.

Judge Ronald L. (“Ingenuity”) Buch, grappling Laocoön-like with twenty (count ’em, twenty) consolidated microcaptives headed up by Skylab Series of Fortress Insurance, LLC, et al., Docket No. 25669-16, filed 9/27/24, gives us a primer on what are appropriate responses to notices to admit and interrogatories. The result is a split decision, but I’m not going into the minutia. Discovery geeks can read that for themselves.

My objection is that a Tax Court judge, one of 15 when there should be 19 (Section 7443(a)), has to spend time on this stuff when the USDCs and State trial courts have shunted these sideshows off to magistrates, special referees, judges’ law secretaries, and law clerks.

I just said it a week ago. See my blogpost “Referee?” 9/20/24.*

If you want to clear a docket, make it clear that gamesmanship is off the menu. Discovery disputes go to the bullpen; stipulate, don’t capitulate; the SPTO (or small-claim version thereof) is “an order, not a suggestion,” as the late Bankruptcy Judge Adlai Stevenson Hardin was wont to say. And courts are where trials take place, so be ready to go.

*https://taishofflaw.com/2024/09/20/referee/