It seems fairly well known that while parties can freely stipulate to most kinds of schedule adjustments in the District of Delaware, changing the dispositive motion deadline is a danger zone that might result in the denial of your stipulation—or worse, such as the loss of your trial date.
But people often do it anyway. Yesterday, visiting Judge Bryson denied a stipulation that would move the case dispositive motions deadline to April 25, 2025 for a trial starting July 14, 2025.
Assuming the parties use the briefing schedule under the local rules, the Court will not have a full set of papers until May 16, less than 2 months before the first day of trial. No wonder the stipulation was denied!
Most often, these days, the judges seem to want (or explicitly require) around 4 months between the close of briefing and the pretrial conference—which, in practice, means that case dispositive motions must be due around 5 months or more before trial.
In its order denying the stipulation, the Court pointed to the short time between the SJ/Daubert papers and trial, plus the fact that the parties did not offer an explanation in the stip:
ORAL ORDER re 66 : The parties have filed a stipulation to extend time. Currently, the discovery cutoff is set for September 27, 2024; the deadline for dispositive and Daubert motions is set for February 15, 2025; and trial is set for July 14, 2025. In the stipulation, the parties seek to extend, among other deadlines, the discovery cutoff by 8.5 weeks and the deadline for dispositive and Daubert motions by 10 weeks. The stipulation is denied. First, the parties provide no explanation for why any extension, much less one of such magnitude, is necessary. Second, the proposed schedule would not give the court sufficient time to thoroughly consider the parties dispositive and Daubert motions before trial. The court is willing to consider a brief extension to the discovery cutoff deadline upon a particularize showing of need, but the other deadlines will not be extended. Signed by Judge William C. Bryson on 9/23/2024.
Memory Technologies LLC v. PNY Technologies, Inc., C.A. No. 23-353-WCB, D.I. 67 (D. Del. Sept. 23, 2024).
The Court indicated that the parties could try again, but that it would be willing to extend only the very first of the parties' deadlines (the discovery cutoff) and not the rest:
It's notable that the Court is unwilling to move the expert report deadlines. It's possible the parties could have agreed to a compressed expert schedule while preserving the dispositive motions date, to provide more time for fact discovery. But the Court may want to keep the overall outline of the schedule as-is.
In any event, this is a good reminder to be careful when stipulating to schedule extensions that impact the dispositive motions deadline, and to consider including a reason in your stipulation extending the schedule before Judge Bryson.
If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to receive free e-mail updates about new posts.
