A Blog About Intellectual Property Litigation and the District of Delaware


Entries for tag: MN

Alpine Forget-me-not. Myosotis alpestris (1925)
Alpine Forget-me-not. Myosotis alpestris (1925) Mary Morris Vaux Walcott

Stipulations to extend time are a popular, both as a topic on this blog and in how routinely they are filed. Usually, stipulations to extend time are granted without incident, so we highlight the outliers as reminders that sometimes there’s more to it than mere agreement between the parties.

Don’t forget! If you’re stipulating to extend the:

  1. Deadline for discovery completion, or
  2. Postponement of trial

You must include the reasons for the request in your stipulation or motion. And the local rules require you to include either a supporting affidavit by the requesting counsel’s client or a certification that counsel has sent a copy of the request to the client.

This latter requirement reminds me of pre-college: in which students who received sub-optimal test scores needed to get a parental signature to prove to the teacher that the parent had seen the score and reviewed the offending test.

The parties in The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania v. Genentech, Inc., C.A. 22-145-MN-JLH demonstrated how to correct deficiencies. Earlier this month, Judge Noreika issued an oral order denying their prior ...

Broken Communication
Reid Naaykens, Unsplash

Parties can freely stipulate to many things in the District of Delaware, and often stipulations to extend deadlines are filed close to the last minute, especially where the parties are working toward agreement but ultimately cannot agree on the final filing in time (or else are having trouble connecting with the other side).

However, stipulations filed close to the Delaware witching hour (5:00PM EST) can be fraught with risk of the Court's denial, as we’ve seen in past heart-stopping examples. We’ve warned before that requests to move Court-scheduled conferences are in the “iffy” category, and combined with last minute filing, can end in disappointment for everyone, as shown in an oral order from Judge Noreika last week in Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc. v. Lupin Limited et al., C.A. 21-1042, D.I. 197 (D. Del. Jul. 16, 2021):

On April 17, 2023, the Court instructed the parties to talk to each other about their disputes so that a follow-up call with the Court (set for April 21, 2023) would be more productive than the prior call. On April 21, 2023, a few hours before the set call, the parties submitted a stipulation requesting the April 21 call be delayed. After further inquiries, it became clear that, in the five days after the Court directed the parties to TALK, they did not do so. The Court intended to address that during the April 21 call, but no counsel appeared for the call (notwithstanding that the Court had not granted the request for a delay). THEREFORE, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that, should the parties not inform the Court that they have resolved their dispute in full by Tuesday April 25, 2023, lead trial counsel SHALL appear in person in Courtroom 4A on April 26, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. ORDERED by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 4/21/2023.

Judge Noreika previously indicated frustration with the magnitude of this particular discovery dispute (on search methods to find responsive documents), so the parties were on thin ice long before ...