[This post is not from the Reed Smith side of the blog.]

Litigation is a game. It is a game with real stakes and broad implications, but it is nonetheless a game played according to certain rules. As in all games, the participants—plaintiffs and defendants alike—try to maximize their advantage within those rules.

In litigation

Here is another post from our junior blogger-in-training, Dean Balaes.  He tackles one of the blog’s favorite subjects, removal before service to bring our readers the skinny on the first case where a plaintiff attempted to interpose a COVID-19 objection to snap removal, unsuccessfully.  Since other plaintiffs might try the same thing, that makes

We have always puzzled over why pre-service removals are the least bit controversial.  We are referring to what are known as “snap removals,” or removals to federal court before any forum defendant has been served.  They are one way to comply with the removal statute’s forum defendant rule.  It’s pretty simple:  Even when you have

The DDL blog is no friend of the forum defendant rule – the exception to removability of diverse cases.  You wouldn’t find us lamenting if it suddenly disappeared because it would take with it busloads of litigation tourists who would no longer have any incentive to sue a forum defendant – often a nominal defendant

Earlier this month we explained that a “wrinkle removal,” was one that capitalized on a “wrinkle” in the language of 28 U.S.C. § 1441(b)(2), which provides that a case cannot be removed on the basis of diversity if any “properly joined and served” defendant is a citizen of the forum state.  But if the forum

In the early days of the Blog, in 2009, when Bexis and Mark Herrmann were operating in relative obscurity, we posed the question whether it was ethical to remove to federal court a case that may well be non-removable and hope that opposing counsel is “asleep at the switch”:

“Heck, I’ll remove it anyway.  Opposing