Wisconsin Business Law and Litigation
A blog dedicated to Wisconsin business law and business litigation matters, authored by Chris Moander of the Moander Law Firm.

Y Combinator and The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students are sponsoring a Startup School for programmers out there eager to make their mark on the business world.

Y Combinator is a venture capital firm specializing in tech/web funding and based in both San Francisco and Cambridge, MA. I learned about them when they started up and they have certainly grown in size and influence since then. The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students is a Stanford student group dedicated to boots-on-the-ground approaches to business creation.

If you are really into technology and startups, you’ll notice that Mark Zuckerberg graces the School’s homepage, hinting at the kinds of minds and attitudes the School hopes to assist. Marc Andreesen is set to speak at the event, hearkening back to the days of Netscape domination in the browser wars (and my first appreciation of just how cool the web could be). Also, David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37Signals, a company that produces tools many business currently use for project management, client/customer management, and real-time chatting.

If you can justify the associated costs (the School itself is free), I would highly recommend attending - you could discover your funding angel or meet your future business partner.

Hat tip - Ryan Roberts at The Startup Lawyer

Once again, Rush Nigut has found some nifty information on the web for entrepreneurs. I particularly like his point about payroll taxes: pay them on time or they come out of your pocket, not your company’s.

Yes, requests for admissions are what they sound like - questions designed to get a party to absolutely admit or repudiate a fact (which can be an event, a statement, a time, a location, etc). It is always beneficial to a party of a lawsuit to “pin” the opposing party to a fixed position on a fact. After all, if you get your opponent to commit to a position in written discovery, it makes it very hard for them to change their story down the road and you also get the benefit of knowing where the opposing party stands with some certainty. Such a tactic comes in handy when your attorney wants to lay what is called a foundation for documents or other evidence. A foundation is testimony or other evidence that allows the court to admit other evidence, much like a concrete foundation supports a house. A foundation laid through well-drafted admissions gets other evidence in faster and with less effort.

To narrow our definition down further, requests for admissions address two very specific needs: one is to eliminate an element of a cause of action from trial; the other (and opposite) is to show the court that a given issue is very much in dispute and thus fit for trial.

I can break down these two concepts into more manageable bites. A cause of action is the legal theory behind a lawsuit (ex: breach of contract). Each cause of action is constructed of elements, as a cake is made of ingredients - however, in most cases, each element must be proven by facts. To eliminate one element is to “kill” the cause of action and that part of the lawsuit is kicked out of court. You can see why admissions can have a profound impact on your case. On the flipside, admission of certain facts confirms that a dispute exists between the parties and the lawsuit remains alive. This scenario avoids what is called summary judgment, meaning that no dispute as to the facts of the case exists and the judge can apply the law to facts as they stand, resulting in no need for a trial.

The most important concept for you, as a litigant, to understand is that once you admit to something via a request for admissions, that factual matter is definitively settled. The only exception is when the court allows you to withdraw and admission, which is rare.

As with interrogatories, you have a limited time to answer and return requests for admission. By now, you probably realize you will need to handle requests for admission with your attorney. Each response, with your assistance, will be meticulously drafted to stay in line with the litigation strategy and to spot any objectionable requests. Your attorney will also inform you that the tactic of “I don’t recall” that worked with depositions and interrogatories will not be allowed with requests for admission - you either admit or deny, there is no middle ground and there are no qualified answers.

Admissions can kill your case, or get the case resolved in your favor, as fast as any single discovery device. Close work with your attorney will pay handsomely.

Next up is our final topic: inspections of documents, places, and things.

Phew! We’ve briefly covered the topic of depositions, a major component of discovery in a lawsuit. Now, we’ll take a look at “interrogatories.”

Interrogatories
Interrogatories, at the most basic level, are written questions served on the opposing party which must be answered truthfully (as you might guess). They can be served at any stage of litigation prior to trial and so are flexible tools. The key use for interrogatories is to confirm concrete facts, such as dates, locations, times, and names - this allows your attorney to “sharpen” other discovery tools so they can uncover even more details of your case.

Esoteric interrogatories will fail to elicit quality information because opposing counsel almost always formulates the response to the interrogatory, but that is not to say the lawyer herself answers the questions. The party answers the questions and then signs those answers; the attorney ensures that the answers conform to the theory of the case and signs only objections to the questions. As you learned in my last discovery post, depositions do not allow an attorney as much control over a deponent’s response as interrogatories do. Another problem posed by interrogatories is that they offer clues as to the serving party’s strategy, mostly because it takes time and money to formulate quality questions (although there is no explicit limit to the number questions allowed in Wisconsin, Federal rules limit interrogatories to 25 questions) and so questions issued are quite specific and narrow, revealing some strategy to those served.

When your attorney drafts a set of interrogatories, he will likely need your help. Specifically, he may probe your knowledge about people who you think know “things” about your case (these folks could be anyone from a janitor to a highly decorated expert in a field) or what documents might contain information about your case - essentially the same information that would be used to determine who your lawyer should depose.

Of course, if you are served a set of interrogatories, you are obligated to answer them (with the help of your lawyer, of course). Your counsel will mostly likely walk you through each question and discuss the answer with you at length. Timeliness is important (you have 30 days to answer and return the questions), so you will probably need to start working on answers as soon as you can. However, if your answers require lengthy or intensive research, your attorney may require more time to complete the questions and will file motions to extend the time to answer.

It is also important that you and attorney agree that you, as a witness and the person subject to the interrogatories, both understand the answers and can testify to those answers - anything less is dangerous to your case. As with almost all discovery, your answers can be used against you at trial. In the same vein, you will also need to be prepared to dig up documents you may not have already handed over during prior discovery as some interrogatory questions request information best “answered” by turning over a document.

Because interrogatories are subject to a bit more control by your attorney, you will likely feel less immediate stress than from a deposition. However, your answers have a real impact on your case. You should work very closely with your attorney in preparing interrogatories in order to maximize both usage and responses.