We spent the past weekend in Cleveland, visiting a dear law school friend of whom we see much too little. Cleveland deserves more press as a travel destination. It boasts beautiful architecture, (including spectacular bridges, like the Detroit-Superior Bridge over the Cuyahoga River), reasonable prices, and the Cleveland Clinic. It is also home to the world-class Cleveland Symphony and the renowned Cleveland Museum of Art. But (not surprisingly, for regular readers of our posts) our most memorable afternoon was spent in that mecca of popular culture, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We had to be dragged away from the continuous loop of induction ceremony highlights. We gleefully donned headphones and entered a simulated recording booth, where we “laid down the harmony track” over a melody line sung by a popular artist. We stared at Elvis’s army uniform and the sheet of paper on which Neil Young first jotted the lyrics for “Heart of Gold.” But we were most captivated by a room-size exhibit devoted to one of our personal idols, Graham Nash, a two-time Hall inductee (with the Hollies and with Crosby, Stills and Nash), onetime Joni Mitchell cohabitant, and author of a song in serious contention to be our all-time favorite, the folk-y classic “Teach Your Children.” (In a minute, we will find a way to tie this, however tenuously, to something legal. We make no such attempt with this link to a lovely moment from the 2007 American Idol finale, on which Nash sat on a stool with an acoustic guitar and performed this song with an Idol finalist.)
Nash is an intelligent, socially-conscious man of diverse talents that include painting and photography. Among the tidbits revealed in the headphone-accessible interview clips interspersed throughout the exhibit was the fact that he is also a serious collector of memorabilia. He seeks to acquire items that capture the seminal moments of significant political and musical events. (For example, his collection includes a piece of the fence that rings the grassy knoll in Dallas.) In today’s case (see – we told you!), a minor cautionary tale from the Mississippi Supreme Court, the seminal moment in the demise of the plaintiff’s case occurred 120 days after she filed her First Amended Complaint. While rock-and-rollers can often flout the rules, it’s always a good idea for lawyers to follow them, as this case demonstrates.
In Meeks v. Hologic, Inc., 2015 Miss. LEXIS 610 (Dec. 17, 2015), plaintiff initially sued a physician and a medical center for injuries she had allegedly sustained two years earlier during outpatient gynecologic surgery. Both defendants answered the Complaint. Two years and 363 days after she discovered her injuries (this becomes important, because Mississippi has a three-year statute of limitations), with leave of court pursuant to the Mississippi rules, plaintiff filed her First Amended Complaint (“FAC”) adding Hologic, manufacturer of a device used in her surgery, as a defendant, and adding warranty claims against all defendants. Plaintiff served the doctor and the medical center with the FAC, but never served the FAC upon Hologic. Neither the doctor nor the medical center answered the FAC. (This was also important in the plaintiff’s mind, but it wasn’t really.)Continue Reading Mississippi Plaintiff Defeated By Improper Construction of “Amend As A Matter Of Course” Rule