Alessi Equipment, Inc. v. American Piledriving Equipment, Inc.
- Judith McCarthy
- 7:18-cv-03976
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 4
In Alessi Equipment v. American Piledriving, Judge McCarthy ordered Alessi to itemize damages by April 29 or risk losing related trial evidence.
Alessi Equipment, Inc. had to provide the ordered damages disclosure by April 29, 2022, or it might be unable to introduce related evidence at trial. American Piledriving Equipment, Inc. obtained the requested requirement that Alessi supplement its damages information, but the order did not itself decide the parties’ underlying claims or the amount of damages.
What happened
In Alessi Equipment, Inc. v. American Piledriving Equipment, Inc., American Piledriving asked the court to require Alessi to provide more detailed information about the damages it claimed before trial.
The court found that Alessi’s disclosure did not list dollar amounts for each category of damages, explain how those amounts were calculated, or describe the methods supporting the calculations. The court also found that the disclosure did not comply with the parties’ pretrial order.
Judge Judith C. McCarthy ordered Alessi to submit an itemized damages calculation, with supporting methods and explanations, by April 29, 2022. The order warned that failing to do so may prevent Alessi from presenting that damages evidence at trial.
The detailed version
- Alessi Equipment, Inc. v. American Piledriving Equipment, Inc. · No. 7:18-cv-03976
- Judith McCarthy
- Apr. 22, 2022
Background
Trial was scheduled to begin on June 8, 2022, and the remaining trial concerned the extent of Alessi’s damages. American Piledriving Equipment, Inc. (APE), the defendant and counterclaim-plaintiff, moved to require Alessi Equipment, Inc. (Alessi), the plaintiff and counterclaim-defendant, to supplement Alessi’s damages statement in the parties’ joint pretrial order. APE asked that Alessi be barred from presenting related evidence at trial if it did not provide the required information.
Alessi argued that it had complied with its disclosure obligations and that evidence preclusion was unwarranted because APE had not raised the issue during earlier discovery conferences. The court rejected that response, explaining that APE’s objection concerned Alessi’s duty to update its damages disclosures and comply with the court’s pretrial order—not whether Alessi had made adequate initial disclosures.
Court’s Analysis
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(a)(1) requires a party to disclose a computation of each category of damages claimed, based on information reasonably available at the time. Rule 26(e)(1)(A) requires the party to timely correct or supplement that disclosure if it later learns that the disclosure is materially incomplete. The court explained that these rules require increasingly detailed damages disclosures as discovery progresses.
The court also relied on its pretrial order, which required Alessi to identify each component or element of damages for each claim and explain the manner and method used to calculate the claimed damages. Although Alessi had disclosed some information and documents during discovery, its pretrial-order statement did not identify numeric or legal categories of damages, provide dollar computations, or describe the calculation methods.
Ruling
The court ordered Alessi, by April 29, 2022, to submit an itemized computation of every component of damages it sought, stated in dollar amounts, together with the methods and methodologies it intended to use to support those calculations at trial. The court stated that failure to comply may result in preclusion of Alessi’s damages evidence at trial. The opinion does not expressly state that APE’s motion was granted or denied; it states the supplementation order and warning directly.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.