Ramachandran v. City of Los Altos

Background

Judge van Keulen referred Case No. 23-cv-02928-SVK for a determination of whether it was related to Case No. 18-cv-01223 under Civil Local Rule 3-12. The court received responses from the City of Los Altos and its employees, called the “City defendants,” and from Pamela Jacobs. It did not receive a response from Satish Ramachandran.

The City defendants argued that the two cases should be related because they involved substantially the same parties and events. Pamela Jacobs argued that Case No. 18-cv-01223 should instead be related to Case No. 20-cv-03693, another case filed by Ramachandran and heard by Judge Freeman.

Court’s analysis

The court acknowledged that the allegations and defendants in all three cases overlapped. Under Civil Local Rule 3-12, cases may be treated as related when doing so would avoid an unduly burdensome duplication of work and expense or conflicting results before different judges.

The court concluded that relating Case No. 23-cv-02928-SVK to Case No. 18-cv-01223 would not serve those purposes. Case No. 18-cv-01223 was stayed pending the conclusion of additional state-court litigation that could have a potentially dispositive effect on it. The court reasoned that if the older case was nearing its end, there was little reason to expect that relating the cases would avoid duplication or increase efficiency.

Disposition

The court determined that Case No. 23-cv-02928-SVK and Case No. 18-cv-01223 are not related within the meaning of Civil Local Rule 3-12. This order addressed case relatedness and did not decide the underlying claims.