Litigation Insights
Analysis and practical guides on litigation.
286 articles, checklists, and guides on litigation law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice—for a specific matter, contact the firm.
MDL Case Management and Bellwether Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist runs a multidistrict litigation from the JPML petition through settlement administration and remand, with separate tracks for leadership counsel, individual inventory counsel, and defense counsel. It covers the transfer stage, the case management orders that constitute the real procedural law of the proceeding, the intake vetting that determines whether an inventory survives, fact sheet and registry compliance, the general causation and bellwether stages, and the settlement participation process including the individual informed consent obligations that apply to every client. A final section covers lien resolution and the remand posture.
Taking and Defending an Expert Deposition: A Practical Guide
This guide walks lawyers, and the clients who pay for expert discovery, through an expert deposition from the day reports are exchanged to the Daubert hearing, in the order the work actually happens. The first part covers the taking side: deciding whether and how long to depose, getting the expert's file by Rule 34 request and Rule 45 subpoena, noticing the deposition and settling the Rule 26(b)(4)(E) fee, researching the expert, building a modular outline, conducting the examination, and turning the transcript into a Rule 37(c)(1) or Rule 702 motion. The second part covers the defending side: structuring the engagement so consultants and testifiers stay separate, responding to the notice and subpoena, preparing the expert on the three Rule 26(b)(4)(C) exceptions, defending with proper objections and instructions, and handling errata, supplementation, and a continued deposition. Along the way it addresses remote and foreign depositions, fee disputes, budgets, and the cases courts cite at each decision point. A day-by-day worked example follows a patent case's expert calendar from rebuttal reports to the Daubert filing, and the guide closes with common mistakes, an FAQ, and practical takeaways.
Designating and Playing Deposition Testimony at Trial: A Practical Guide
This guide walks a trial team through designating, editing, and presenting deposition testimony in a federal civil trial, from the first transcript inventory to the moment a clip plays for the jury. It summarizes the governing rules (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 16, 26(a)(3), 30, and 32 and the hearsay, completeness, and impeachment rules of evidence) and the cases that decide recurring disputes about unavailability, counter-designations, and waiver. The core of the guide is an eight-step process with a countdown timeline: choosing live or recorded testimony, proving a Rule 32 route, cutting designations, exchanging and objecting, obtaining rulings, building synchronized clips, presenting at trial, and impeaching on the fly. It then covers recurring evidence problems, strategy for the designating and opposing parties, costs, and common mistakes. A worked example follows a commercial case from the designation deadline to the verdict, and the guide closes with an FAQ and practical takeaways.
Evaluating a New Civil Case: A Practical Checklist
Evaluating a civil case is the discipline of deciding, before you spend real money, whether a claim is worth bringing or worth fighting. This checklist turns that craft into ordered gates: clearing conflicts and papering the engagement, preserving evidence, building the proof matrix and pinning the burden of proof, scoring liability and damages as separate variables, testing collectibility, screening the threshold defenses that end cases before the merits, budgeting the fight and choosing a fee structure, and converting everything into a number and a settlement range through a decision tree and expected-value analysis. Each phase pairs the steps with the governing authority and the failure modes that catch even experienced lawyers. It is general information, not legal advice; statutes of limitations, jurisdictional rules, and damages caps vary by jurisdiction and change over time.
Mastering Interrogatories: A Comprehensive Guide to Objecting and Responding in Civil Litigation
Interrogatories are written questions, answered in writing and under oath, that one party serves on another to develop facts, identify witnesses and documents, and pin down an opponent's contentions in civil litigation. This comprehensive guide explains the governing framework of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 33—the 25-interrogatory numerical limit and how courts count discrete subparts, the scope and proportionality limits imported from Rule 26(b)(1), contention interrogatories and their timing under Rule 33(a)(2), and the option to answer by producing business records under Rule 33(d). It examines the verification requirement, the rules for stating objections with specificity after the 2015 amendments curtailed boilerplate, and the most common objection types with model language. The article also covers how to draft definitions and instructions, when interrogatories beat depositions or requests for admission, the duty to supplement under Rule 26(e), motions to compel and the cost-shifting and sanctions regime of Rule 37, and the strategic deployment of interrogatories as both offense and defense—all illustrated with example interrogatories and model responses a practitioner can adapt.
Enforcing a Foreign Judgment in the United States: A Practical Guide
A judgment from a foreign court has no automatic effect in the United States, and there is no treaty that makes it enforceable. What exists instead is state law: most states have adopted a uniform recognition act under which a foreign money judgment is recognized unless one of a short list of mandatory or discretionary grounds applies, and once recognized it is enforced exactly like a domestic judgment. The analysis therefore proceeds in two distinct stages that practitioners routinely conflate—recognition, which is about whether the foreign court's judgment counts, and enforcement, which is about collecting. This guide covers the recognition standards and their defenses, the procedural routes to a domestic judgment, the different and easier rules for sister-state judgments and arbitral awards, and the collection work that follows.
Seeking Discretionary Review in a State Supreme Court
A state supreme court grants review in a small fraction of the cases presented to it, and the reasons it grants have little to do with whether the decision below was wrong. Discretionary review exists to resolve conflicts, settle questions of first impression, and correct decisions of institutional significance, which means a petition arguing that the intermediate court misapplied settled law to particular facts is asking for something the court does not do. This guide covers what the criteria actually require, how to preserve and frame an issue so that it is reviewable at all, the mechanics and deadlines that vary by state, the drafting of the petition and the answer, and what happens after review is granted. It also addresses the strategic questions—federal claims, amicus support, publication practice, and stays—that shape the outcome before any brief is written.
Antitrust for Technology Companies: Monopolization, Platform Conduct, and the IP-Antitrust Interface
Technology companies operate in markets with network effects, near-zero marginal costs, and winner-take-most dynamics, which produce high concentration through ordinary competitive success and also create powerful incentives to keep competitors out. Antitrust law is the body of doctrine that tries to distinguish between the two, and it has been unusually active in the technology sector for the first time since the Microsoft case. This article explains the framework a technology lawyer actually needs: the elements of monopolization and attempted monopolization under Section 2, why market definition decides most cases and why it is unusually hard for platforms after Ohio v. American Express, the specific conduct theories that recur in technology disputes including exclusive dealing, tying, self-preferencing, refusals to deal and interoperability, and predatory pricing, and the rule of reason framework that governs agreements under Section 1. It covers the major recent cases, the merger review regime and the 2023 guidelines, and the interface between intellectual property and antitrust, including standard essential patents and FRAND commitments, patent settlements after Actavis, licensing restrictions, and refusals to license. It closes with a compliance program, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.
Federal Deadline Toolkit: Calendaring Protocols, Extension Motions, and Excusable Neglect Declarations
This toolkit collects working papers for avoiding and recovering from missed federal deadlines. It includes a written calendaring protocol, a computation worksheet, a deadline triage matrix, pre-deadline and post-deadline extension motions, an excusable neglect declaration, a notice-of-appeal extension motion, a Rule 16(b)(4) motion, a stipulation with proposed order, and a CM/ECF failure declaration. It also provides a client letter, a call script, a carrier notice, an opposition outline for the other side, a self-represented motion, and a root-cause review form. Each paper states its purpose, owner, and timing, and each is followed by drafting notes tied to authority. All templates use bracketed placeholders and need adaptation to the court's local rules and the facts.
Statutes of Limitations, Accrual, and Tolling: The Clock That Ends Most Claims
More claims die on the calendar than on the merits, and the reason is rarely that a lawyer forgot a date. It is that accrual is harder than it looks, the applicable period is often not the obvious one, and the doctrines that stop the clock are narrower than practitioners assume. This article works through when a claim accrues under the injury rule and the discovery rule, the difference between a statute of limitations and a statute of repose and why that distinction defeats tolling arguments, the continuing violation doctrine and its limits after Morgan, and the tolling mechanisms that actually work—equitable tolling, equitable estoppel, class action tolling, statutory suspension, and relation back. It closes with choice-of-law problems, contractual limitations periods, and a practical diary discipline for a portfolio of claims.
Appellate Record and Brief Checklist: A Practical Checklist
Appeals are won and lost on two things that have nothing to do with persuasive writing: whether the error was preserved below, and whether the standard of review permits the court to do anything about it. A brilliant brief attacking a discretionary ruling reviewed for abuse of discretion, on an issue raised for the first time on appeal, is a brief that loses. This checklist runs the appeal in sequence: the jurisdictional deadline and what tolls it, the preservation review that determines which issues survive, the standard of review that determines which are worth raising, assembling the record and the appendix, structuring and writing the brief to the court's rules, and the post-argument steps. It ends with the recurring defects that draw the court's attention away from the merits.
Default Judgment Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist turns federal default practice into phased, check-off tasks for both sides of the case. The plaintiff's phases run from confirming service and computing the response date through the request for entry of default, the servicemember and protected-party checks, the choice between a clerk's judgment and a court judgment, the damages record, the Rule 55(b)(2) motion, and the proposed judgment and enforcement. The defendant's phases run from day-one triage through motions to extend time, to set aside an entry of default, and to vacate a default judgment under Rule 60(b)(1), (4), and (6), along with stays of enforcement and stipulations. Each item links the governing rule, statute, or case and adds a short practical note. Red-flag boxes, a deadlines table, a short worked example, and a list of common failure points close the checklist.