Brown v. Columbia Sussex Corp.

• Decision Date: 15 December 2011
• Docket Number: No. 10–3849.,10–3849.
• Citation: 664 F.3d 182
• Parties: Adrianna BROWN, et al., Plaintiffs–Appellants, v. COLUMBIA SUSSEX CORPORATION, et al., Defendants–Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

664 F.3d 182

Adrianna BROWN, et al., Plaintiffs–Appellants,

v.COLUMBIA SUSSEX CORPORATION, et al., Defendants–Appellees.

No. 10–3849.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued Sept. 22, 2011.Decided Dec. 15, 2011.

Trent A. McCain (argued), Attorney, McCain Law Offices, P.C., Merrillville, IN, for Plaintiffs–Appellants.

Brett M. Bollinger (argued), Attorney, Allen & Gooch, Metairie, LA, Louis W. Voelker, III, Attorney, Eichhorn & Eichhorn, LLP, Hammond, IN, for Defendants–Appellees.

Before POSNER, FLAUM, and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

FLAUM, Circuit Judge.

The underlying litigation in this case concerns a host of plaintiffs-appellants' civil rights and breach of contract claims against defendants-appellees—the owners of Baton Rouge Marriott and an individual employee of the Marriott (collectively, “Marriott”). Throughout the pre-trial discovery of this litigation, 224 of the 268 plaintiffs continually missed both formal and informal deadlines.¹ As a result, all but 44 of the plaintiffs had their claims dismissed by the district court as a discovery sanction pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. Rule 37(b). Appellants constitute 53 of the 224 unattentive plaintiffs.² For the reasons set forth below, we affirm the district court's dismissal of appellants' claims.

I. Background

For 20 years, appellant James Piggee and his organization Giving Education Meaningful Substance (“G.E.M.S.”) has been taking groups of African American high school students on tours of historically black universities to make them more aware of their academic opportunities. In April 2008, Piggee planned a trip to Louisiana and Texas for a group of somewhere between 149 and 268 students. In preparation for that trip, Piggee reserved 41 rooms at the Marriott in Baton Rouge. A day or two later, Marriott canceled the reservation. Appellants allege that Marriott's decision to cancel was racially motivated. As a result of the cancellation, appellants did not have a place to stay in Baton Rouge and had to drive through the night to their next destination in Texas.

Based on these allegations, Piggee filed suit in the Northern District of Indiana for himself, the students, and the chaperones that attended the April 2008 trip. In December 2009, Marriott served extensive discovery requests on all 268 plaintiffs, including requests for the production of documents, responses to interrogatories, and responses to Fed.R.Civ.P. Rule 36 requests for admission. In January 2010, appellants asked for their first extension. They initially asked Marriott for a 45–day extension, but before receiving a response, they requested a 60–day extension from the court, which was granted without objection. The new deadline of March 29, 2010 came and went without any production or response from appellants. On April 6th, Marriott wrote a letter to appellants' counsel asking when to expect a response to the discovery requests, but received no answer. Appellee sent another letter requesting production on April 13th, and in response to this second letter, appellants emailed Marriott requesting an extension until May 31, 2010. The third deadline once again passed with no response from appellant.

On June 16, 2010, five months after the original discovery deadline, Marriott filed a motion to compel a response to discovery. The district court granted the motion with respect to the interrogatories and document requests, but noted that requests for admission cannot be compelled as these requests are deemed admitted after 30 days of no response. The court ordered that appellants respond to discovery requests by July 16, 2010. On the date of the fourth deadline, appellants filed a Motion for Extension of Time, seeking an extension to July 23, 2010. The court did not grant the motion because of technical problems with appellants' motion. Thus, for a fourth time, appellants did not meet their deadline. As a result, Marriott filed a motion for sanctions and contempt, seeking dismissal and payment for Marriott's expenses, including attorney's fees.³ The court declined to dismiss, but granted Marriott's request for expenses as a sanction against appellants. The court also granted appellants' second Motion for Extension of Time, giving them until August 17th to comply with the court's order. This extension was granted in part because of plaintiff-counsel's representations that he was a sole practitioner, that he only had one administrative assistant, that he had been working round-the-clock to comply with the court's orders, and that he had interviewed a law firm to help with the discovery requests. In granting appellants' motion, the district court made clear that this was the “final extension” that would be granted, and that further requests would be “viewed with disfavor.” In addition, a magistrate judge's Findings, Report, and Recommendation regarding Marriott's motion for sanctions listed the court's sanctioning options if appellant failed to respond to discovery. These options included the possibility of dismissal.

For the fifth and final time, appellants failed to meet their discovery deadline. On August 20, 2010, Marriott filed another motion for contempt and sanctions, naming over 200 plaintiffs that had not yet responded to the appellees' discovery requests. In plaintiff-counsel's September 27th response to this motion, he indicated that 60 plaintiffs had responded to the discovery requests and that he had not received a response from the others. He also sought class certification due to the unmanageability of the discovery requests. During oral arguments for that motion, plaintiff-counsel acknowledged that he had only communicated with roughly 75 to 100 of the plaintiffs, which led the district court to concluded that the majority of the plaintiffs may not have even been aware that the suit had been filed on their behalf.

On November 10, 2010, in its ruling on Marriott's motion for sanctions, the district court concluded that the Fed.R.Civ.P. 37(b) sanction of dismissal was necessary in the face of appellants' willful delay and avoidance of Marriott's requests for discovery. The district court based this decision on appellants' pattern of delay and non-compliance, which included the following actions or omissions: 1) appellants' disregard of two of the court's orders to compel discovery; 2) appellant's lack of response when faced with the less severe sanction of payment of defendants' expenses; 3) appellants' lack of a showing that additional sanctions would be effective in forcing them to comply with the court's orders; 4) plaintiff-counsel's lack of communication with the majority of the plaintiffs; and 5) plaintiff-counsel's lack of secured co-counsel, which, the court noted, would be a difficult task given the posture of the case at the time of dismissal.

On December 10, 2010, appellants filed their notice of appeal from the district court's decision to dismiss their claims. Our preliminary review of appellants' appeal indicated that the district court's order may not have been a final judgment under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 ⁴ (“ § 1291”), and on December 21, 2010, we ordered appellants to file a Jurisdictional Memorandum, due on January 4, 2011. One day before the deadline, appellants returned to the district court and filed a motion requesting an entry of final judgment pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. Rule 54(b) and 58(d).⁵ The next day—the due date for the Jurisdictional Memorandum—appellants filed a motion entitled “Routine Motion For An Extension of Time to File Jurisdictional Memorandum,” which was granted. On January 7, 2011, the district court granted appellants' Rule 54(b) motion, finding that appellants' claims are separate from the claims of the remaining plaintiffs, the decision dismissing appellants' claims is final, and there is no just reason for delay. A final judgment was therefore entered.

Appellants subsequently filed their Jurisdictional Memorandum with this court, which advised the court of the case's procedural history and concluded that the district court's Rule 54(b) motion rendered the jurisdictional question moot. The next day, this court issued an order stating, “On consideration of the ‘JURISDICTIONAL STATEMENT’ filed by plaintiffs-appellants on January 11, 2011, IT IS ORDERED that briefing will proceed.”

II. Discussion

A. Jurisdiction

Before we turn to the relatively straight forward matter of the propriety of appellants' dismissal, we must address Marriott's assertion that we lack jurisdiction to decide this appeal in the first place. Whether we have jurisdiction depends on the interaction between three statutory rules: Congress' conferral of jurisdiction on this court under § 1291, Rule 54(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (“Rule 54(b)”), and Rule 4(a) of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure (“Rule 4(a)”). To start, § 1291 generally limits our jurisdiction to the review of only “final decisions” of the federal district courts. See Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Wisconsin, 760 F.2d 177, 180 (7th Cir.1985); 28 U.S.C. § 1291. Decisions are final when they “end[ ] the litigation and leave [ ] nothing to be decided in the district court.” United States v. Ettrick Wood Prods., Inc. 916 F.2d 1211, 1216 (7th Cir.1990). Generally, if an action involves either multiple parties or one party with multiple claims, the dismissal of some but not all of the parties or claims is not immediately appealable; the parties or claims that still exist prevent the order from being “final.” Id. at 1216–17; Fed.R.Civ.P. Rule 54(b). Rule 54(b), however, empowers a district court to “direct entry of a final judgment as to one or more, but fewer than all, claims or parties,” but only if the court “expressly determines that there is no just reason for delay,” Fed.R.Civ.P. 54(b), a process commonly referred to as “certification.” See, e.g., Parish v. City of Elkhart, 614 F.3d 677, 679 n. 2 (7th Cir.2010). The Supreme Court has...