Pettit v. Allina Health System
- John Docherty
- 0:23-cv-02789
- U.S. District Court · District of Minnesota
- 26
In Pettit v. Allina Health System, Judge Docherty ordered fees and recommended dismissal with prejudice and additional sanctions over counsel’s filings and discovery delays.
DaJovan Pettit faced a recommendation that her claims be dismissed with prejudice, but was not personally sanctioned. Richard W. Hechter was ordered to pay Allina $9,752.50 and was recommended, along with Morris Law Group, to pay an additional $10,000. Allina Health System was awarded the ordered discovery-related fees and was the proposed recipient of the additional sanction.
What happened
DaJovan Pettit sued Allina Health System, alleging racial discrimination during her employment. Allina sought fees after obtaining an order compelling discovery and sought sanctions against Pettit’s lawyer, Richard Hechter, and his firm.
The court found that discovery responses were 53 days late and that Hechter had ignored repeated communications. It also found that he copied serious factual allegations from another case into Pettit’s complaints, failed to correct them after Pettit objected, and misstated the legal meaning of another case. The court declined to sanction Pettit personally.
Judge John F. Docherty ordered Hechter to pay Allina $9,752.50 for fees connected to the discovery motion. He recommended granting Allina’s sanctions motion in part and denying it in part, including dismissal with prejudice of Pettit’s claims and an additional $10,000 payment by Hechter and Morris Law Group; the recommendation was subject to objections and was not yet a final district-court judgment.
The detailed version
- Pettit v. Allina Health System · No. 0:23-cv-02789
- John F. Docherty
- Jan. 30, 2025
Background
DaJovan Pettit brought an employment-discrimination case against Allina Health System. The operative complaint alleged racial discrimination, including claims that supervisors and other employees used racial slurs. The complaint was filed and signed by Richard W. Hechter, Pettit’s attorney, and the amended complaint was filed on February 2, 2024.
Allina served interrogatories, document requests, and a deposition notice on March 20, 2024. Pettit’s discovery responses were due April 19. After receiving no timely responses or required initial disclosures, Allina’s counsel repeatedly contacted Hechter, sought an informal discovery conference, and warned that Allina would move to compel. Pettit eventually served responses 53 days late and one week after Allina filed its motion to compel. At a June 27, 2024 hearing, the court granted the motion to compel.
Fees for the Motion to Compel
Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37, when a motion to compel is granted, the court generally must require the party or attorney responsible for the discovery failure to pay the moving party’s reasonable expenses, unless an exception applies. Allina requested $9,752.50 for work by its attorneys. Pettit’s counsel argued that the amount was excessive and that imposing it would interfere with Pettit’s ability to litigate the case.
The court rejected those arguments. It found that staffing problems at Hechter’s firm and Hechter’s temporary unavailability because of a skin-cancer diagnosis and surgery did not substantially justify the nearly two-month delay, the failure to provide disclosures, or the failure to respond to opposing counsel. The court found Allina’s hourly rates and requested hours reasonable and noted that Allina had already excluded some potentially recoverable time.
The numbered Order directed Richard W. Hechter to pay Allina $9,752.50 for attorneys’ fees incurred in connection with the motion to compel.
Rule 11 Sanctions
Rule 11 requires an attorney who files a court paper to make a reasonable inquiry into the factual and legal support for it. It also requires factual allegations to have evidentiary support and legal arguments to be warranted by existing law or a nonfrivolous argument for changing the law.
The court found that Hechter copied substantial portions of a complaint from an earlier related employment-discrimination case against Allina and presented allegations from that complaint as Pettit’s experiences. The court relied in part on Pettit’s deposition testimony that she had no evidence supporting several of the copied allegations, had not been supervised by certain named individuals, and had told Hechter that the complaint was inaccurate and needed amendment. The court found that Hechter filed both the original and amended complaints without adequately investigating or correcting the allegations.
The court also found that Hechter violated Rule 11 by citing a state probate decision as support for his argument that an award of all attorneys’ fees would be improper. According to the court, that decision did not discuss Rule 11 sanctions or support the proposition for which Hechter cited it.
Recommended Sanctions and Disposition
The court recommended that Allina’s Rule 11 sanctions motion be granted in part and denied in part. It recommended granting the request to dismiss Pettit’s claims in full, with prejudice, both as a Rule 11 sanction and because the court believed the remaining allegations would not state a plausible hostile-work-environment claim after removing the copied allegations. It recommended granting the request for attorneys’ fees in part by ordering Hechter and Morris Law Group, jointly and severally, to pay Allina $10,000. It recommended denying the request to impose Rule 11 fees on Pettit herself.
The court stated that the total sanctions it was imposing or recommending in connection with the case amounted to $19,752.50: the $9,752.50 discovery-related award plus the recommended $10,000 Rule 11 sanction. The court specifically declined to punish Pettit for her attorney’s conduct.
This document was an Order and Report and Recommendation. The $9,752.50 discovery-fee ruling was an order. The Rule 11 dismissal and additional monetary sanction were recommendations, not a final district-court judgment, and the notice stated that parties could file specific written objections within 14 days after being served. The recommendation was not directly appealable to the Court of Appeals at that stage.
Read the full 26-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.