Most Delaware attorneys tend to hesitate before filing an "emergency" motion, because they know how busy the Court is. The Court takes emergency motions seriously. It may defer work on other pressing issues to assist the parties with a true emergency.
I don't think anyone would want be standing before the judge (or on a conference call, or a video conference) explaining why they unnecessarily disturbed the Court's management of its docket.
Last week, Judge Connolly issued an opinion showing what may happen when a party files an unwarranted "emergency" motion.
In FinancialApps, LLC v. Envestnet, Inc., C.A. No. 19-1337-CFC-CJB (D. Del.), a trade secret and contract action, the Court had referred all motions to Magistrate Judge Burke, and had issued a scheduling order with the usual discovery dispute procedures.
The Scheduling Order included the normal, unambiguous language:
Any discovery motion filed without first complying with the following procedures will be denied without prejudice to renew pursuant to these procedures.
Despite that language, plaintiff FinancialApps filed an "Emergency Motion to Amend the Scheduling Order" that sought an extension to various discovery deadlines—including some already past—in light of various "discovery issues." The motion described those issues in detail in an 7.5-page fact section and over 100 pages of exhibits.
Judge Connolly made clear that this is not an appropriate basis for an emergency motion:
The first motion is mistitled "Plaintiff FinancialApps, LLC's Emergency Motion to Amend the Scheduling Order." . . . The motion does not present or seek to remedy an emergency, and its request to amend the schedule is at most incidental to the thrust of the motion. The motion is really a motion to compel. In other words, it's a discovery motion; and it should have been presented to the Magistrate Judge and should have complied with the procedures and briefing requirements the Magistrate Judge put in place for resolution of discovery disputes in this case. Accordingly, I will deny the motion. FinApps can raise its discovery issues with the Magistrate Judge. The Magistrate Judge has the authority to resolve those issues and, if he sees fit, to amend the Scheduling Order to give FinApps adequate relief for any failures by Defendants to produce timely discovery.
Judge Connolly also addressed a separate pending motion filed by the other side seeking to split the action into four separate trials on various trade secret and contract issues, and emphasized how busy the Court is:
Defendants request by this motion that I break the case into four—yes, four—trials. . . . It is evident from the nature and number of discovery disputes the parties have brought before the Magistrate Judge and the overreaching of both sides in the motions and briefs they have filed with the Court to date that counsel treat this case as if it were the only case pending before the Court. But this case is only one of 600 cases on my docket; and it is certainly not among the more complex cases I am currently handling.
Judge Connolly also noted how defendants Envestnet and Yodlee had characterized the case in conflicting ways, stating first that
[T]his litigation does not involve a complicated, expansive set of facts . . . .
but, later, that
[T]his case is sprawling. It will require resolution of dozens of complex and often quite disparate factual issues under multiple [ ] areas of substantive law (of multiple states), and trying all of these issues at once would prove unwieldy, unnecessarily costly, and confusing.
The Court denied the request for four separate trials.
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