Powers v. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
- Lorna Schofield
- 1:20-cv-02625
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Powers v. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Judge Schofield denied reconsideration and a request to extend expert discovery.
Scott Powers and the defendants, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, were affected by the ruling on the order and deadline for expert depositions.
What happened
Powers v. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center involved the scheduling of expert depositions and the deadline for completing expert discovery. The court had directed that the defendants’ expert depositions occur after Plaintiff Scott Powers’s expert, Dr. Davidson, was deposed.
Powers asked the court to reconsider that scheduling order and requested an additional 30 days to complete expert discovery. He argued that it was unfair to require six defense-expert depositions during the last eleven business days before the February 28, 2021, deadline.
Judge Lorna G. Schofield denied the motion for reconsideration and denied the request for a 30-day extension. The court said Powers had not shown a change in controlling law, new evidence, clear error, or manifest injustice, and had not given a compelling reason why the six depositions could not be completed between February 11 and February 28, 2021.
The detailed version
- Powers v. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center · No. 1:20-cv-02625
- Lorna Schofield
- Dec. 28, 2020
Background
The parties jointly requested more time to complete expert discovery. Their letter stated that Plaintiff Scott Powers’s expert, Dr. Davidson, was first available on February 10, 2021. The court extended the expert-discovery deadline to February 28, 2021, and stated that, absent extraordinary circumstances, it would grant no further extensions.
The defendants then asked the court for guidance about the order of the expert depositions. The court directed the parties to schedule the defendants’ expert depositions after Dr. Davidson’s deposition because Powers bears the burden of proof and the defendants’ experts might rebut testimony provided by Powers’s experts during a deposition.
Motions and arguments
Powers filed a motion for reconsideration on December 23, 2020, and filed a replacement motion on December 24, stating that the earlier filing was a mistakenly filed draft. The motion argued that the defendants’ December 21 pre-motion letter misquoted the court’s December 18 order. It also requested a 30-day extension, arguing that it was unfair and unreasonable to require the plaintiff to wait until the last eleven business days of February to complete six defense-expert depositions that had been tendered, scheduled, noticed, and subpoenaed for January.
Court’s analysis
The court explained that reconsideration is available only when the moving party identifies an intervening change in controlling law, new evidence, or a need to correct clear error or prevent manifest injustice. It also stated that reconsideration is not a way to relitigate old issues, present new theories, obtain another hearing on the merits, or take a second opportunity to make the same argument.
The court rejected the motion because Powers had not identified any of those grounds. It noted that the disputed quotation in the defendants’ letter was text that the court itself had underlined in its December 18 order. The court also found that Powers had not provided a compelling reason why six depositions could not be completed between February 11 and February 28, 2021.
Disposition
The court denied Powers’s motion for reconsideration. It separately denied Powers’s request for a 30-day extension of the time to complete expert discovery. The Clerk of Court was directed to close the motions at Docket Nos. 163 and 166.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.