Chambers Memorandum

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CHAMBERS MEMORANDUM

To:          Junior Law Clerk

From:    Judge John L. Kane

Re:          GyneTech Litigation

This is a rather heady assignment for your first day on the job, but as you graduated from that prestigious law school at the top of your class, I am sure you are up to it. I need you to review various case-management techniques and legal criteria so that we can begin to connect the tentacles of a number of lawsuits to the head of a forensic squid. Many issues will follow, and we can count on the usual plethora of motions that make the Rules of Civil Procedure look like the Boy Scout Handbook.

Our local rules provide that related cases be assigned to the judge who drew the first case. The relationship is not necessarily a technical one involving joinder and consolidation; it is more a matter of putting one judge in charge of herding the cats. In this particular instance, we drew a whistleblower action against GyneTech Corp. (These cases always involve a race to the courthouse, and that is why it was filed first.) As you soon will discover, this cause of action was favored by Congress and disesteemed by the executive branch. To a government agency, a plaintiff in a qui tam action is about as welcome as an illegitimate child at a family picnic. Nevertheless, we will admit paternity and defer naming until the baptism.