As the late great William James Basie was wont to direct. Tom Gonzales, T. C. Memo. 2025-103, filed 10/8/25, and his trusty attorney, whom I’ll call Mike, try to fight an old battle o’er, but 9 Cir blew them away seven (count ’em seven) years ago.

Tim is trying to wiggle into the interstice between partnership and partner levels in the old TEFRA régime. He claims his deficiency case, which preceded the FPAA, started the clock, but he stiped that away back then. Next he claims the TMP didn’t have authority to twice waive 3SOL, except he intervened in the FPAA case, and could have raised the TMP’s want of authority then, but didn’t. Issue preclusion then shuts Tom out. Affected items (no SND needed when partner-level hit comes directly from partnership-level determination) does the rest.

I doubt the post-BBA 2015 scenario would yield a different result. What’s fascinating is that years at issue go back nearly 25 (count ’em, 25) years to the nearly-forgotten Son-of-BOSS days.

Chas. Dickens’ immortal words come back to me now.

“This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two …lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.” Bleak House, Ch. 1.