Civil Procedure – discovery — dismissal

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United States Court of Appeals

Civil

Civil Procedure – discovery — dismissal

Where the plaintiffs continually missed discovery deadlines, it was not an abuse of discretion to dismiss their cases.

“The appellants’ discovery violations in this case are undeniably more comparable to the plaintiffs in Aura Lamp and Watkins than the plaintiff in Long. Unlike the plaintiff in Long, appellants did not make a single discovery error, and their repeated missteps were not explainable by a reasonable misunderstanding. Appellants missed five discovery deadlines and violated two court orders. They completely failed to respond to numerous interrogatories—a violation even more grave than the incomplete interrogatories found in Watkins. Like the attorney in Aura Lamp, appellants’ counsel did not have the resources to handle a case of this nature, yet he failed to either decline the case or enlist the help of outside counsel at a reasonable point in the litigation. Perhaps most telling was counsel’s inability to even speak with the majority of the plaintiffs that he was supposed to be representing. The dismissal is further supported by the fact that the district court first attempted to use the less severe sanction of paid expenses to compel compliance from the appellants, but to no avail. See Lowe v. City of East Chicago, Ind., 897 F.2d 272, 274 (7th. Cir 1990) (‘The district court should consider less severe sanctions than dismissal for a party’s noncompliance with court orders or failure to prosecute his or her claim expeditiously, unless there exists a clear record of delay or contumacious conduct or when less drastic sanctions have proven ineffective.’ (emphasis added) (internal quotation marks omitted)).”

Affirmed.

10-3849 Brown v. Columbia Sussex Corp.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, Simon, J., Flaum, J.