Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I took Civil Procedure from a couple of highly talented professors. One was among my favorite teachers of all time— he taught the concept of joinder with a shopping bag full of Beanie Babies™ and, for some baffling reason, a Jessie the Cowgirl™ doll from Toy Story 2.* On the surface, that’s a very weird thing for a licensed attorney to put into a blog post, but the fact is, generations of JD’s from the University of Missouri-Kansas City know joinder cold because of Jeffrey Berman’s frequent flier card at Toys ‘R’ Us. Third-party claims, cross-claims, counterclaims? Yeah, we got this.
That said, due to the compressed nature of that semester, and the reality that you just can’t learn everything you need to know as a 1L, we never really touched on certain basic concepts. Like “how do you serve process?” or “why is the judge such a grumpy gus and how do I assuage his ire?” or “is it too late to get my LSAT fee back?”
Continue Reading Subpoena: both a sword and a shield.
Timmy the Biglaw Associate realizes that he needs to discover documents from a company in Italy. Timmy knows from CivPro class that discovery requires a subpoena, so he dutifully sits down and writes one, to command the company to produce any and all documents related to XYZ, et c. He seals it up in
You’ve served the complaint on all of your defendants, they’ve entered their appearances, and everybody is girded up for battle. Discovery commences. In one of your depositions, you learn that one of the defendants was somehow selling a knock-off of your client’s product in Europe through a British distributor, and you are convinced that somewhere
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