McKenzie-Morris v. V.P. Records Retail Outlet, Inc.
- Gregory Woods
- 1:22-cv-01138
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 13
McKenzie-Morris v. V.P. Records, Judge Woods granted Defendants’ Rule 11 sanctions motion over a judicial-notice filing, without deciding the copyright claims.
Plaintiffs and their counsel were found to have filed a frivolous judicial-notice motion and became subject to Rule 11 sanctions. Defendants were granted sanctions, with attorneys’ fees potentially payable after further documentation and review. The underlying copyright claims were not decided by this order.
What happened
McKenzie-Morris v. V.P. Records involves copyright-infringement claims by Shauna McKenzie-Morris and a business she co-owns. This order did not decide those claims; it addressed Defendants’ request for sanctions based on Plaintiffs’ request that the court recognize statements in documents filed in other cases.
The court had previously denied Plaintiffs’ request for judicial notice. It concluded that Plaintiffs were effectively asking it to accept statements in those documents as true to show a factual dispute about ownership, even though court filings generally may be noticed only to establish that the filings occurred, not that their allegations are true. The court also noted that it had repeatedly warned Plaintiffs’ counsel about these problems before the motion was filed.
Judge Woods granted Defendants’ motion for sanctions under Rule 11, finding the judicial-notice motion frivolous. The court concluded that payment of Defendants’ attorneys’ fees was justified and ordered Defendants to submit time records within fourteen days, but it did not set the final amount of any payment.
The detailed version
- McKenzie-Morris v. V.P. Records Retail Outlet, Inc. · No. 1:22-cv-01138
- Gregory Woods
- Oct. 31, 2022
Background
Plaintiffs brought copyright-infringement claims seeking injunctive and declaratory relief concerning Shauna McKenzie-Morris’s written music, recording services, image, name, likeness, musical compositions, albums, and sound recordings. The court expressly stated that this order did not address the substance of those claims.
After Defendants moved to dismiss the amended complaint, Plaintiffs asked the court to take judicial notice of four documents filed in other cases. Judicial notice is a procedure allowing a court to accept certain facts without ordinary proof when they are not reasonably disputable. Plaintiffs said they did not seek notice of the documents for the truth of their contents, but also said the documents would establish a legitimate factual question about Plaintiffs’ claims and ownership rights.
At conferences on July 12 and August 31, the court repeatedly questioned how Plaintiffs could use the documents to show that Defendants’ statements were contradicted without asking the court to accept the documents’ descriptions of events as true. The court also explained that, at the motion-to-dismiss stage, it does not decide credibility and generally evaluates agreements based on their terms. On August 31, the court denied Plaintiffs’ judicial-notice motion.
Rule 11 issue
Defendants later moved for sanctions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11. Rule 11 requires an attorney filing a motion to certify, after a reasonable inquiry, that the legal arguments have a nonfrivolous basis under existing law or a reasonable argument for changing the law. The rule also permits sanctions when that certification is violated.
The court held that Plaintiffs’ judicial-notice motion was frivolous. In the court’s view, Plaintiffs could establish the alleged factual dispute only by treating statements in documents from other cases as true. That use was barred by the governing law on judicial notice. The court rejected Plaintiffs’ repeated statements that they were relying on the documents only to show that the statements had been made, because Plaintiffs’ stated purpose required the court to treat those statements as accurate.
The court gave significant weight to its repeated warnings to Plaintiffs’ counsel before the motion was filed. It found that counsel had been told that the proposed argument might violate Rule 11 and had been asked to consider the motion’s legal basis, but filed it anyway. The court did not reach Defendants’ alternative argument that the documents were independently sanctionable because they were irrelevant.
Attorneys’ fees and disposition
The court concluded that sanctions were warranted and that a monetary payment in the form of attorneys’ fees was justified to deter baseless filings and compensate Defendants for opposing the judicial-notice motion and litigating the sanctions motion. The court did not determine the amount at this stage. Instead, it directed Defendants to submit contemporaneous time records identifying each attorney, the dates worked, the hours spent, and the nature of the work. Those records were due within fourteen days of the order.
The court cautioned that Defendants had to document the hours and rates, exclude excessive or redundant time, and seek no more than a reasonable paying client would pay. It also stated that it retained discretion to limit any eventual sanction to what was needed to deter similar conduct. The conclusion states that Defendants’ motion for sanctions was GRANTED. The Clerk was directed to terminate the sanctions motion from the docket.
Read the full 13-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.