Biglaw Firm's Representation Of Porn Client Lands Them In Hot Water With A Judge... Again

When you have over 2,000 cases on behalf of the same client there's bound to be deadline-based shenanigans.

We’ve written before about Fox Rothschild and its… unusual representation of porn studio, Strike 3 Holdings. Over the last few years, the Biglaw firm has filed thousands of copyright lawsuits on behalf of Strike 3, which were overwhelmingly against John Doe porn downloaders. The cases are more than just vaguely titillating cocktail party fodder, they’ve also helped the firm earn the ire of U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia who said their client, Strike 3, “treats this court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM.”

In separate cases filed in California state on behalf of Strike 3, Fox Rothschild, led by partner Lincoln Bandlow, must now argue to Magistrate Judge Carolyn Delaney why they shouldn’t be sanctioned $250 for missing deadlines in a bunch of cases. Which is exactly the kind of deadline-based shenanigans one might anticipate when you file 2,185 cases in 2018.

As reported by Law.com, it seems Fox Rothschild failed to filed status reports in at least 15 cases, though 25 cases are at issue, within a 45 day period. They’re reportedly blaming the error on a combination of technical issues and staff holiday plans:

Bandlow said in court filings that Strike 3 failed to file the status reports because it had “encountered issues with its calendaring procedure” for cases in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. He also said the filing mistakes were in part due to a lack of staff during the holidays and an inability to receive emails from the court.

Bandlow elaborated on the technical issues to Law.com:

[Bandlow] also said a number of the court’s docketing emails were caught in his assistant’s spam filter, and he had technical issues with the federal court docketing software DocketBird. He said those issues were confined to the Eastern District of California and also confined within Fox Rothschild to his practice.

In an attempt at sanctioning self-help Bandlow said they’ve “sort of sanctioned ourselves in a weird way” by voluntarily dismissing the cases with missed deadlines, wasting the $400 filing fee in the process. He also told the court they’d fix the technical problems before additional cases were filed in the Eastern District of California.

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headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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