For our second profile of an interesting Minnesota trial lawyer (our first, Elliot Olsen, can be found here), we had the chance to sit down recently with Jim Behrenbrinker to talk about his diverse practice and the big excessive force/wrongful death claim he brought against the City of Minneapolis. Behrenbrinker was formerly at Robins Kaplan […]

Updating a previous post regarding a Holiday fire-drill thanks to plaintiffs’ emergency motion for a temporary restraining order and expedited discovery, the “emergency” motion was denied by Judge Rosenbaum on 12/29. Plaintiffs keep up the pressure with a motion for immediate discovery (not awaiting the Rule 26(f) scheduling conference).  One wonders if there might have been a […]

“It’s a business issue, even though it is the dispensing of the embodiment of Christ that we are talking about…”

It seems to me that an unwritten rule of U.S. civil litigation is that courts, in a large number of cases in which the award of attorneys’ fees is a possibility, prefer not to award them (and it is common, also, for courts to give fee claims a “haircut.” See, e.g., here.) Redman v. Sinex, […]

Cancel the holiday plans if you’re counsel for Compucredit. Plaintiffs’ filed their eighteen-page complaint on Dec. 21 and the hearing on their motion for a temporary restraining order seeking expedited discovery is to be argued before Judge James Rosenbaum (D. Minn.) on December 29. The causes of action are (1) a claim under the Uniform […]

Judge James M. Rosenbaum is known to occasionally wield the pen as a sword (or, in Minnesotan spirit and consistent with his metaphor of attorneys as remoras, as a fish gutting knife?). Judge Rosenbaum’s recent response to a request for attorneys’ fees in the UHG class action litigation cut deeply. He denied the request for […]

Originally filed in November, 1999, the environmental clean-up litigation has gone back up to the Eighth Circuit and back down to the U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota (Rosenbaum, J.), repeatedly. Ten years of litigation seems excessive perhaps until it is measured against years of polluting and contamination that may remain for generations or require […]