Litigation Insights

Analysis and practical guides on litigation.

199 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.

LitigationTrial and Post-Trial

Jury Selection and Voir Dire: A Practical Guide for Civil Trials

Jury selection is the only phase of a civil trial in which a lawyer is not trying to persuade, and the most common mistake is forgetting that. Voir dire exists to identify the people who cannot be fair to your client and to develop a record supporting their removal, and every minute spent arguing the case instead is a minute not spent finding them. This guide covers how the venire is assembled and what challenges to its composition are available, the difference between a challenge for cause and a peremptory strike and how each is used, the Batson framework as it applies in civil cases, the mechanics of the struck jury and strike-and-replace methods, and how to design questions that actually surface bias. It closes with jury questionnaires, permissible juror research, and the post-verdict issues that trace back to selection.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 7, 202524 min read

LitigationMass Torts

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.

Casey Scott McKayNovember 4, 20258 min read

LitigationCivil Litigation Strategy

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.

Casey Scott McKayOctober 19, 20259 min read

LitigationDiscovery

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.

Casey Scott McKayOctober 18, 202554 min read

LitigationJudgment Enforcement

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.

Casey Scott McKayOctober 16, 202525 min read

LitigationAppellate Practice

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.

Casey Scott McKayOctober 14, 202526 min read

LitigationAntitrust Litigation

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.

Casey Scott McKayOctober 2, 202527 min read

LitigationCivil Procedure

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.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 10, 202525 min read

LitigationAppeals

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.

Casey Scott McKaySeptember 8, 202511 min read

LitigationCross-Border Litigation

Serving a China-Based Defendant Under the Hague Service Convention: A Practical Guide

When a U.S. company sues a China-based company, getting the defendant validly served is one of the first and hardest problems in the case—and getting it wrong can cost the plaintiff personal jurisdiction or leave it holding a judgment no Chinese court will enforce. This guide explains, in plain language for lawyers and business owners, how service on a Chinese defendant works under the Hague Service Convention: when the Convention applies under Volkswagenwerk v. Schlunk, how service through China's Central Authority (the Ministry of Justice) actually proceeds and how long it really takes, and why the usual shortcuts—mail under Article 10, consular service, local agents—are foreclosed by China's reservations. It then takes a hard look at the live frontier: court-ordered alternative service under FRCP 4(f)(3), email service after Rio Properties, and the Schedule A e-commerce cases where judges routinely authorize service by electronic means on elusive Chinese online sellers. It closes with the FRCP 4(d) waiver route, the SinoType contractual workaround, drafting guidance, a worked example, and an FAQ.

Casey Scott McKayAugust 17, 202537 min read

LitigationEvidence

Authenticating Website Evidence: A Practical Checklist

Website screenshots, archived pages, and social media posts appear in nearly every modern case, and attorneys routinely lose this evidence by failing to lay a foundation. This checklist turns the law of electronic-evidence authentication into ordered, actionable steps: preserving and capturing web content the moment it is found, authenticating a live page, authenticating a historical page through the Wayback Machine the way Weinhoffer requires, proving authorship on social media, and clearing the remaining Lorraine hurdles of hearsay and the best evidence rule. It pairs each step with the governing Federal Rules of Evidence and the leading cases, and ends with the easy shortcuts—stipulations, requests for admission, and authentication by production—that can make formal authentication unnecessary. It is general information, not legal advice; authentication standards vary by jurisdiction and continue to evolve.

Casey Scott McKayAugust 16, 202510 min read

LitigationMotions

Preliminary Injunction and TRO Application Checklist: A Practical Checklist

An emergency motion is drafted in days and decided on an incomplete record, and the papers that succeed look like they were prepared months in advance. This checklist covers the whole package: confirming the standard in your circuit, assembling the declarations, drafting relief that is prohibitory and specific enough to be enforced by contempt, satisfying Rule 65(b) if proceeding without notice, proposing a bond, and preparing the proposed order. A separate phase covers defending an application on short notice, where the highest-value moves are asking for time, offering a standstill, and fighting on scope rather than on principle. Throughout, the emphasis is on the evidentiary record, because emergency relief is granted on declarations and exhibits rather than on argument.

Casey Scott McKayAugust 15, 20258 min read