Judge: Mark H. Epstein, Case: SC126845, Date: 2023-05-19 Tentative Ruling

Case Number: SC126845    Hearing Date: May 19, 2023    Dept: R

The court believes that the case is at issue.  The court will send the matter to Department 1 for determination of long cause status as soon as the parties address the issues in Department 1’s order dated March 17, 2023.  Specifically, the parties need to revise the jury instruction to eliminate the blank lines and brackets; plaintiff’s special instructions should be reformatted to follow the same format as used by defendants; the witness list must be revised to add a new column with either a “yes” or “no” stating whether a particular witness is truly expected to testify (assuming that the court does NOT preclude testimony based on an in limine motion); the witness list must contain a subtotal column and summary of the totals of witnesses actually expected to testify for each side’s case on direct examination and cross-examination per the Long Cause Trial Guidelines; the parties must meet and confer further to consider stipulating as to the authenticity of exhibits and admissibility of exhibits, particularly things like written discovery responses and the like; the exhibit list must be revised to use whole numbers only for exhibit numbers; the exhibit list must be revised to eliminate “blank” or “reserved” exhibits; the parties must insure that the exhibits are properly described, meaning bates number, subject matter, dates, and other identifying information and there must be separate numbers for the individual documents within broadly identified categories of documents; descriptions such as “photos” must be revised to specify what they are; descriptions like “emails” must be revised to be more specific, which is also true of similar types of descriptions; and finally the parties must revise the exhibit list so as to eliminate duplicative exhibits and also to have unique descriptions for each exhibit.

At the last hearing, the parties stated that they would be ready by now, but the court does not see any new documents filed.  The court will inquire as to the status, and will hold a status conference with great frequency until this is done.  All of the issues strike the court as ministerial; none are substantive.  Accordingly, the court believes that the parties should have little trouble complying with that order.  The court does not mean to trivialize the amount of work required, but it has been two months since the order was issued.  The court is becoming concerned.