Senior U.S. District Judge John P. Fullam recently gave a good finger-wagging to the lawyers on both sides of an insurance bad faith case by disposing of a hefty stack of pretrial motions with a two-page memorandum and a one-page order that denied them all.
"It seems clear that counsel are more interested in annoying each other than in advancing meritorious positions," Fullam wrote in Micocci v. Allstate Insurance Co.
The tersely worded opinion -- just four paragraphs long -- is classic Fullam, taking the lawyers to task for spending hours drafting a slew of motions that, in the judge's opinion, were a complete waste of time.