The Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) is slated to hear oral argument in G4S Technology LLC v. Mass. Technology Park Corp. on Monday, March 5, 2017 – a case with significant implications for construction litigation.
The dispute arises out of a $45 million public works project to build a 1200-mile fiber optic network bringing high speed…
We have written previously on this blog about the importance of a timely notice of appeal in the Massachusetts Appeals Court. The issue bears revisiting in the federal courts following the decision by the United States Supreme Court in Hamer v. Neighborhood Hous. Servs. Of Chicago, No. 16-659 (November 8, 2017).
Justice…
The First Circuit Court of Appeals recently released its proposed amendments to Local Rule 25.0, governing the use of electronic document filing (“e-filing”). While Many of the proposed amendments incorporate familiar aspects of the e-filing system in Massachusetts Federal District Court, there are some notable differences and aspects to point out. The following is a…
The Supreme Court recently decided a case involving an Xbox 360, although the issue before them had nothing in particular to do with the video game system itself. It got me wondering, however, how many justices would you guess have played a video game on an Xbox 360? The answer might be zero. But the…
Appellate lawyers are constantly asked (and asking themselves) some variant of the same question: “How long until we get a decision?” The reality is that it’s hard to know. Nevertheless, most will, after being pressed, venture a guess based on their informed experience.
To supplement our informed experience, we conducted an analysis of twenty-one recent…
In April 2017, the Appeals Court launched an oral argument pilot program that staggers attorney appearance times. This means that the “old days” of arriving at oral argument before 9:30 a.m. and waiting through a series of arguments before your case is called may soon be history. The pilot program organizes the oral arguments in…
I chair the Appellate Law Section of the Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel. Members of our section recently put on a great program on how to make legal briefs more effective for judges and law clerks who read them on electronic devices rather than on paper. While the Massachusetts state appellate courts still…
In Cardno ChemRisk, LLC v. Foytlin, 476 Mass. 479 (2017), the Supreme Judicial Court held that the anti-SLAPP statute protected two bloggers’ critical opinions contained in a blog post directed at a scientific consulting firm working for British Petroleum (“BP”) in the wake of the Deep Water Horizon spill.
The defendant bloggers, two environmental…
The Massachusetts Appeals Court recently decided two issues of first impression in a case arising out of a mediated settlement gone bad. See ZVI Construction Co. v. Levy, 90 Mass. App. Ct. 412 (2016) (“ZVI”). The court determined that there was no fraud exception to a written mediation confidentiality agreement, and that one party in a joint representation cannot unilaterally waive the attorney-client privilege. An issue that received less acclaim, but which is essential to any practitioner considering an appeal, was the court’s discussion of the timeliness of a notice of appeal under Massachusetts Rule of Appellate Procedure 4.
In ZVI, the appellant filed a noticed of appeal after all claims against the primary defendants were dismissed. However, claims against other defendants remained, meaning that final judgment had not entered. Accordingly, ZVI’s notice of appeal was premature. This procedural defect came to light when the Appeals Court raised the issue at oral argument. The court allowed the parties to return to Superior Court to file a joint motion for entry of separate and final judgment under Mass. R. Civ. P. 54(b). After separate and final judgment entered, ZVI should have filed a new notice of appeal; it did not. The Appeals Court noted that ZVI failed to make good on its second chance by not filing a new notice of appeal after separate and final judgment entered. Therefore, the case was not properly before the court. Nonetheless, the Appeals Court chose to breathe life back into the procedurally deficient appeal to resolve the important and fully briefed issues.Continue Reading Not Quite a Final Judgment: Steering Clear of the Perils in Filing a Notice of Appeal
I recently attended a presentation by futurist Michael Rogers that sparked me to think about what the courtrooms of the 2020s might look like. According to Rogers, one of the next big advances in technology will be augmented reality devices, such as smart glasses. Google previewed that with its “Google glass” product, which was unsuccessful…
