I happened to be looking up some old posts on District 150, and I ran across the post on Kay Royster’s racial-discrimination lawsuit against the school board from July 2006.
I haven’t heard anything about it lately, so I did a little research. The latest filing was on February 14 — a Motion to Compel. It was filed by the defendants (school board) and says:
- Plaintiff has failed to answer defendants’ interrogatories and requests for production served on December 5, 2006.
- Defendants’ counsel has undertaken good faith efforts to try to obtain discovery responses and documents from plaintiff’s counsel but such efforts have proved unsuccessful.
- Plaintiff’s discovery misconduct has unduly delayed and interfered with the scheduling of plaintiff’s deposition and other necessary discovery.
In a supplementary memorandum, the defendants further stated, “Since filing her complaint seven plus months ago, plaintiff [Royster] has only within the past week provided the documents referenced in her tardy initial Rule 26 disclosures, and has ignored any need to respond to defendants’ interrogatories and requests for production. As a result, plaintiff has deprived defendants of what should have been a standard part of the early discovery process.”
“Rule 26 disclosures” are simple things like a list of possible witnesses, any documents that support each party’s case, how much they’re seeking in damages, etc. Yet, Royster was slow in delivering these standard disclosures, and apparently has still not given the defense all the information they’re due.
Doesn’t this seem odd? I’m no lawyer, so maybe one of my lawyer readers can weigh in here, but isn’t it usually defendants who drag their feet in lawsuits? Why would a plaintiff ever want to do this?
Maybe she doesn’t want to answer embarrasing questions? Perhaps she thinks delay will cause adverse witnesses to retire/leave town/
foget/die, etc.?
Maybe she thinks that running up the other side’s legal bills will result in a desire to give her a settlement offer?
Any number of possibilities.
Ummm ’cause she has no case?
Okay, I was about to comment on this when I went to read the motion and realized my husband’s firm is defending the school board on this one and GOD ONLY KNOWS how much trouble that got me in last time. Anyway, I didn’t know they were related to the case until just now. (And both Lee Smith and Ambrose McCall are kick-ass human beings, very good lawyers, and entirely entertaining dinner guests.)
So full disclosure concluded, in addition to what’s suggested above (all excellent reasons to delay Rule 26s), further abstract (i.e., on any case, not just this one) reasons for Rule 26 delays could be:
*Her lawyers trying to run up HER bill (some lawyers are sleazy! Who knew?)
*Her retainer ran out and the firm won’t do any more work until the client pays up
*Personal illness or emergency on the part of Ms. Royster or the attorney managing her file (this ideally shouldn’t happen on the attorney’s side, but it does, particularly in smaller firms)
*Loss of documents or delay in acquiring them, although typically you’d file something saying “oh crap, I lost my documents, I need an extension” if that were the case.
*overloaded law office with more cases than it can properly handle
*massive, sudden, badly-managed change in law-office personnel resulting in lost or delayed files that nobody knows about because the people who knew about them are all suddenly gone
*bad attorney-client relationship such that neither likes to have to deal with the other until absolutely necessary which typically leads to ridiculous amounts of procrastination
I can’t even make a best guess because in a lot of those cases you’d expect SOME kind of response from the defendant, even if just to say “we need more time.”
I do note that if you go to the plaintiff firm’s website http://www.ghsltd.com/lawyers.cfm , Ms. Margolies is not listed on the directory of attorneys.