I have been doing some reading. We will start with the Plaintiff's.
Plaintiff's Motions in Liminine ("MIL") are fairly standard and expected until we get to MIL #7. They seek to exclude evidence that is not relevant to the limited bifurcated trial scheduled to take place starting on April 28. They want to keep from evidence things like the alleged actions that were taken by West folks against USAPA. The reason is that none of that is relevant to the limited questions for trial. Had this been a trial to the judge these motions would not likely be made because the judge would decide admissibility of evidence as a bench trial occurred or even after he heard it. With a jury they have to fight out ahead of time what the jury can actually hear.
The first one that really caught my attention was Plaintiff MIL #7. This one may well be very important. According to the MIL, Defendant has done two huge data dumps of information to the plaintiffs of random data that was sometimes relevant to the case and discovery requests, and sometime outside of the discovery requests. The problem with a date dump of the type alleged to have happened is that it potentially wastes a party's resources going through totally irrelevant data while searching for relevant data. This is potentially a discovery abuse, but not as large as what I describe in the next paragraph.
Also, according to MIL #7, Defendant has supposedly designated expert witnesses well after the discovery cut-off and denied the plaintiffs time to review any reports and to conduct depositions of these people. One of the proposed expert witnesses was apparently deposed prior to him being mentioned as a proposed expert witness and the Plaintiffs claim that they were denied proper opportunities to conduct the deposition as if the person were to be an expert witness. (Unlike normal witnesses, expert's that are qualified by the court are allowed to render opinions in their testimony compared to normal witnesses who discuss observations and person observations. However they are not allowed to give opinions based on a set of facts presented to them. The preparation of witnesses and expert witnesses are two entirely different things.) The Plaintiffs are basically calling this entire matter a fundamental discovery abuse that cannot be rectified before an April 28th trial date.
Skipping to Defendants Combined MIL the first thing I noticed was that it was a combined document that contained 33 different MIL's/Motions to Exclude. I have previously opined that I thought the defendant's counsel were aggravating the judge with various behavior and arguments. The combined 33 issues in a single motion is likely to not endear counsel to the Court. It is confusing and hard to ready compared to doing separate motions for each that can be reviewed, considered and then set aside.
Item #12 caught my eye because it seeks to prevent the Plaintiffs from discussing the Empire Shuttle issue. If I remember all the various history correctly, and someone can feel free to correct me, USAPA is taking a totally contrary seniority position in that case from this case. So they want to be able to argue one position in that court and an entirely different position in this court, despite attorneys having a duty of truth to all judicial proceedings.
Item #30 seeks to keep Plaintiffs from arguing in opening statements that the Court has already ruled that the Nicolau Award is contractually enforceable on Defendant. It seems to me if the Court has already ruled as such that the jury should not be precluded from hearing of it.
It will be interesting to see what the Court does with these motions over the next few days. I would expect rulings by April 17th, and would not be surprised if they came earlier.
