[Updated, below.] You might think of any litigation, civil or criminal, as a layer of law blanketing an underlying set of facts. If you think of litigation as layered in this way, you can easily imagine situations where a lawyer might be implicated in two layers. For example, a lawyer might advise a client about the meaning of a […]

If your French is like mine, you may only know this term as the name for a very good restaurant that used to be in the Saint Paul Hotel.  But I am told it means “Star of the North”.  Minnesota’s official motto, I believe. But here I use the title as a reference to the […]

If, hypothetically, I had ever done something in my youth that I now regret, we’re cool because my years of living dangerously (hypothetically) would have been pre-internet. Any (hypothetical) shenanigans would long ago have been buried under the massive sediment of unrecorded, unphotographed, untweeted, unblogged, obscurity. But we are in a new world of ubiquitous and eternal data collection and disclosure, of course. […]

Update (5/24/2014): Yeah. No. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Update (5/20/2014): The explanation of the urgency is here (?). Original post (5/17/14): (EXERGENT CIRCUMSTANCES: EXERGY’S EMERGENCY REQUEST TO ORDER MY ADVERSARY TO TAKE MY MONEY!) A TRO (temporary restraining order) seeking an emergency order that an opposing party accept millions of dollars in unpaid […]

While Minnesota Litigator focuses on Minnesota state and federal civil litigation, I occasionally wander into other jurisdictions to cast a light on work of Minnesota lawyers elsewhere. A team of Faegre Baker Daniels lawyers has had a recent and significant battle win in a contract case pending in Ohio (though the war rages on). It […]

Should Minnesota courts adopt Twombly/Iqbal standards for pleading?  That’s the question the Minnesota Supreme Court considered last week The pleading standard lawyers all learned in law school was Conley v. Gibson.  That said, a complaint was viable unless it appeared beyond doubt that the plaintiff could prove no set of facts entitling him or her to relief.  […]

Last week, I was critical of a defendant’s stingy discovery responses, based on Plaintiff St. Jude’s brief in support of its motion to compel responses from Defendant Grubiak. Was I unfair? You be the judge (well, literally U.S. Mag. Judge Jeffrey J. Keyes (D. Minn.) will be the judge): here is Grubiak’s response. In short, Mr. Grubiak objects to St. […]

  If you consider the way St. Jude Medical and Biosense go at one another for their sales employees, a cynic might be tempted to quip that their greatest relative competitive advantages are not so much their products, their medical devices (and accompanying intellectual property, support services, etc.) as their respective sales forces. This week, U.S. District Court […]

When you’re defending an executive (named Grubiak) for allegedly breaching his fiduciary duties to his former employer (Saint Jude Medical) who allegedly jumped ship and joined a direct competitor (Biotronik), can you really take the position that St. Jude’s discovery targeting your client’s contacts with Biotronik about your client’s new job are: irrelevant, immaterial or not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery […]

Many erroneously believe that Alabama is a relatively sweet home state and Minnesota is thought to be the home of bitterness (bitter cold, that is). With all due respect to Lynyrd Skynyrd and the great state of Alabama, this is simply wrong. In fact, it is demonstrably false. (I can only conclude that Lynyrd Skynyrd might […]