Attorneys from Boies Schiller, Quinn Emanuel, and Ropes & Gray are on a federal judge’s shit list. The trio of firms work on behalf of Servicios Funerarios GG in its suit against private equity firm Advent International Corp. in a case involving the sale of a Mexican funeral company, Grupo Gayosso. And Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts isn’t happy with the Biglaw firms. In a hearing on Friday, she ripped into the attorneys for over-litigating the case — and necessarily running up those legal fees.
As reported by Law360:
The judge said seemingly endless motions and filings in the case had the effect of relitigating points and appeared to be “an effort to try to gum up the works.”
“I don’t understand how 11 lawyers can jointly make what we are doing here difficult,” Judge Talwani said. “It is not serving you well — your clients paying your bills — and I do want you to pass this message to your client: In order to try to keep your bills down, it would be helpful to try and figure out whether there are some things that don’t have to be fought about.”
“That might serve your clients,” the judge added. “It might not serve your pocketbooks, and you can tell your clients that was my comment.”
Not the kind of comments you want to see on record.
Now, admittedly, it’s a complicated case with arrest warrants, sanctions motions, finagling over deposition dates, so many delays and lots of entries on the docket. That seemed to be the tipping point for the judge.
Judge Talwani complained Friday that the parties’ efforts to confer on issues have been of little help to her court’s management of the docket. A pair of letters filed an hour before the status conference appeared to spark the judge’s public fuming and dressing down of the attorneys.
Lawyers for Advent International sent the court a letter explaining they had conferred with Servicios about a timeline that would govern how the case advanced through the end stages of fact discovery, expert witnesses and pretrial dispositive motions. It said Advent and Servicios disagreed on the exact schedule, and it then attached a table that included only Advent’s proposal.
Half an hour later, Servicios also filed a letter outlining its proposed schedule, including a May trial date.
“I’m just not sure why it wouldn’t occur to you, just give me that on one single piece of paper,” the judge said.
Boies Schiller attorney Carlos Sires said their client “shares the court’s frustration” — and they’re the ones footing the bill.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].