Phoenix Light SF Limited v. The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation
- Valerie Caproni
- 1:14-cv-10104
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Phoenix Light SF Limited v. The Bank of New York Mellon, Judge Caproni granted exclusion of an expert opinion about 18,939 loans.
The ruling affects plaintiffs’ expert Ingrid Beckles’s challenged opinion about 18,939 loans and the defendant’s motion to exclude it; the scheduled June 29, 2020 hearing was canceled.
What happened
Phoenix Light SF Limited and other plaintiffs relied on expert Ingrid Beckles’s opinion that 18,939 loans had document exceptions that were never corrected. The opinion was based on reports called “cure” reports.
The defendant argued that Beckles misunderstood those reports as identifying corrected exceptions rather than remaining exceptions. After deposing the defendant’s witness, Tiffany Vose, both sides agreed that a scheduled hearing was unnecessary because the deposition resolved the factual issue.
Judge Valerie Caproni granted the defendant’s motion to exclude Beckles’s opinion, finding that it rested on an unsupported assumption. The court also canceled the June 29, 2020 hearing.
The detailed version
- Phoenix Light SF Limited v. The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation · No. 1:14-cv-10104
- Valerie Caproni
- June 24, 2020
Background
The defendant had filed a motion under the rules governing expert evidence to exclude, among other things, expert Ingrid Beckles’s opinion that 18,939 loans had document exceptions that were never corrected. Beckles relied on “cure” reports from February 29, 2018. Her report treated loans with previously identified exceptions that did not appear on those reports as loans whose exceptions remained uncured.
The court had scheduled a June 29, 2020 hearing to address whether the reports listed cured or uncured exceptions. The court allowed the plaintiffs to depose the defendant’s witness, Tiffany Vose. After that deposition, the parties agreed that the hearing was unnecessary because the deposition conclusively resolved the factual issue.
Parties’ Arguments
The plaintiffs argued that the deposition showed the cure reports were incomplete and therefore did not establish whether exceptions listed in a final exceptions report had been corrected. They contended that Beckles’s figure may have been higher if she had not subtracted loans appearing on the cure reports, and that Beckles could still testify that she had seen no evidence of cured exceptions.
The court concluded that these arguments did not overcome the problem in Beckles’s expert report. The report specifically asserted that exceptions remained uncured based on their omission from the cure reports. The defendant did not have to prove that the exceptions had been corrected; the plaintiffs, as the proponents of the expert testimony, had to show that the testimony met the admissibility requirements of Federal Rule of Evidence 702.
Ruling
Judge Valerie Caproni granted the defendant’s motion to exclude Beckles’s opinion that 18,939 loans had document exceptions that were never corrected. The court found that the opinion relied on a faulty premise and that Beckles had no evidentiary basis for asserting that the exceptions remained uncured. The court also ordered that the June 29, 2020 hearing be canceled.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.