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Court Error – Admittance of Evidence

By: Derek Hawkins//July 18, 2017//

Court Error – Admittance of Evidence

By: Derek Hawkins//July 18, 2017//

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Tate & Lyle Americas, LLC, et al.  v. Glatt Air Techniques Inc.,

Case No.: 16-3893 & 17-1045

Officials: BAUER, POSNER, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Court Error – Admittance of Evidence

The plaintiff, which for simplicity we’ll call just Tate, sells ingredients used in the food and beverage industry. The defendant, Glatt, a member of a substantial German conglomerate called the Glatt group, sells processing equipment to the food industry. In 2008 Tate and Glatt made a contract whereby Glatt would for $7,042,022 design and build a three-story-tall food-manufacturing machine called a granulator, which would be installed on Tate’s premises in Sycamore, Illinois. The following year, after the granulator was up and running, it caught fire and was seriously damaged. The product being processed at the time of the fire was a corn product that was flammable and during processing gave off flammable dust.

More than three years later Tate brought this lawsuit against Glatt, basing federal jurisdiction on diversity of citizenship and claiming that the fire had resulted from defects in the granulator—either failure to install a fire-suppression system or defects in filters essential to filtering the flammable dust from the exhaust of the machine.

Glatt argues that the judge should not have allowed Tate to argue to the jury that any of the filters in the granulator were defective, because before the trial Tate had in response to a request for admissions by Glatt admitted not being “presently aware of anyone that observed cracked, chipped, or poorly fitting filters in the Granulator following work performed by Dynacoil [a Glatt contractor, shortly before the fire],” and Tate also admitted not having discovered “any evidence that one or more of the Granulator filters or filter housings [was] cracked, chipped or poorly fitting at the time the September 17, 2009 fire started.”

Glatt’s brief recites a laundry list of additional alleged errors in the proceedings below, relating to the admission of evidence, its request for additional discovery, and other matters. But its arguments are close to being cursory, and the issues they raise were resolved soundly by the trial judge. Because we find that neither the magistrate judge nor the jury committed a reversible error, the judgment of the district court is affirmed.

Affirmed

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Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.

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