Downtown Lawyer

Sentis Group, Inc. v. Shell Oil Co., Nos. 07-2308/2573/3162.

Plaintiffs in this case operated Shell gas stations and convenience stores under contracts that required Shell to reimburse plaintiffs for some of the costs of maintaining retail gas operations.  The case turned on how those costs were calculated.  Plaintiffs claimed that Shell misrepresented how those calculations would be made.

The parties engaged in extremely contentious discovery.  The parties disputed (1) whether several persons were plaintiffs’ employees or consultants, (2) whether certain documents were protected by attorney-client privilege or if the privilege had been waived by providing those documents to an expert, (3) whether plaintiffs produced all of the conversations with Shell employees they had secretly recorded, and (4) whether plaintiffs had concealed financial information and e-mails.  Shell filed a motion for sanctions based on plaintiffs’ conduct during discovery.  Based on plaintiffs’ refusal to produce information in discovery, the trial court stated:

. . . I kept telling you to produce stuff, expert stuff.  You ducked.  You wove.  You did everything to keep from producing them.  You go to the Eighth Circuit.  They tell you to produce them, and you still goddamn don’t produce them.  Now what the hell do you not understand? . . . That’s it.  I’m done.  I’m granting the defendant’s motion to dismiss this case for systematic abuse of the discovery process. . . .

After this hearing, plaintiffs submitted a motion for recusal, which the trial court denied.

On appeal, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reverse the trial court on the recusal issue, vacated the trial court’s order of dismissal, and remanded the case for reassignment and reconsideration of the motion for sanctions.  The court stated that “neither party behaved in a manner consistent with the spirit of cooperation, openness, and candor owed to fellow litigants and the court and called for in modern discovery.”  The court then noted that the trial court had directed profanities to plaintiffs over fifteen times during the course of the litigation and that a reasonable man would harbor doubts about the judge’s impartiality in this situation.