Good Stuff on Tap This Week

Privileged and Confidential Joint Defense Communication
To: Kansasjdt
From: Don Schultz
Re: 10/25 call
Please try to participate in this week's JDT-wide conference call. We will have a lot on the agenda. So far, I have identified the following items you should be thinking about.
1. Reply Brief to Motion to Dismiss. We hope to stimulate/provide argument suggestions to the authors who are starting on the reply brief, on the front end. Time will be short for review and comments later, since the brief is due Nov. 2. Please read the plaintiff's opposition brief and be prepared to provide the drafters with your suggestions about reply arguments up front. If you send those to ddavis@hollandhart.com by email, we'll circulate them before the call to help the discussion proceed more efficiently.
2. Discovery Responses on Personal Jurisdiction.
a. The Discovery Committee will discuss whether the provision of Judge Smith's written order, reminding Sharp that he has to confer before any motion to compel is intended to substitute for the oral request the judge made that all objections be filed in advance.
b. Please reconsider how completely your clients have responded to the "Kansas contacts" discovery. Defendants who qualified or limited their "Kansas contacts" answers to provide information only as to contacts related to gas measurement in Kansas, may want to reconsider those limitations and work to supplement the answers in order to provide a more complete picture of a defendant's Kansas contacts, to avoid having the personal jurisdiction motions bogged down in discovery disputes or delays - at least we should try to come to a consensus about that strategically.
c. Please reconsider what objections you have made to the "Kansas contacts" discovery requests the Judge has ordered us to respond to. We'll have to decide whether to present objections to the judge up-front and should consider what we should or should not do to narrow those potential disputes.
3. Personal Jurisdiction Motion to Dismiss. Larry Tanenbaum reminds me we are only about six weeks away from having to file the affidavits and brief(s) on personal jurisdiction, with a Thanksgiving holiday in the interim. Yikes! Obviously the work to answer the discovery will dovetail a lot with the work needed to revise or prepare affidavits to support p.jd. dismissal. We'll try to come up with a game plan to get affidavits in to Gerry Pecht for coordinated review before they are finalized, and to make sure we are proceeding with a good time line to finalize the p.jd. papers.
4. Case Management Order. It seems clear, I think, that we should hold to the current p.jd. filing and hearing schedule, in order to dissuade a bunch of follow up discovery on Kansas contacts or risk having class cert decided ahead of p.jd. Should we also seek to resist Plaintiff's preliminary suggestions that the class cert briefing and argument should be delayed - Moore/QUinque problems notwithstanding - on the premise that we are better prepared to oppose class cert than the plaintiffs are to support it? Or should we negotiate with Sharp to slide the class cert back and how much?
Please let me know if you think there are other issues we should discuss.