Have you ever filed a reply to a counterclaim where your reply was 89 pages long and to which you attached more than 200 pages of exhibits? I think you probably haven’t, but the Plaintiff in the Business Court case Fountain v. Fountain Powerboats, Inc. did. When the Defendant made a Motion to Strike the Reply, Judge Gale granted it in an Order filed last Friday,  saying that dissecting all the irrelevant allegations of the Reply "would burden this opinion with a tediousness serving no useful purpose.”” Op. ¶21.

            The legal issue decided in the opinion was whether a responsive pleading like a reply to a counterclaim or an answer to a complaint gives the responding party the latitude to provide the Court with “notice of the transactions, occurrences, or series of transactions or occurrences, intended to be proved,” which is what the Plaintiff said his rambling Reply had provided. The problem with that argument was that the quoted language, from Rule 8(a) of the North Carolina Rules of Civil Procedure, applies only to complaints. The part of Rule 8 that governs answers to complaints and replies to counterclaims doesn’t contain that language and doesn’t permit “a new cause of action or other matter beyond the scope of the new matter raised in the answer.”

 In other words, complaints and counterclaims, which set forth causes of action, allow for a “richness of detail” which isn’t warranted in a response to those allegations.

 
The court ruled that the expansive reply included statements that were “immaterial, impertinent, and redundant,” which included allegations which were

  • “self-promotional,”
  • Self-serving and irrelevant metaphors and analogies,”
  • “Statements that appear to serve no purpose but to frustrate Fountain Powerboats current operations and promote RF Powerboats,” and
  • Unnecessary name calling”

Those types of things are frowned upon, although necessary name calling is often tempting.

And as for the hundreds of pages of exhibits, Judge Gale said that “none of these exhibits are germane to any legitimate defenses that can be asserted by Reggie Fountain.”Op. ¶22.   In fact, he said that the only reason for the exhibits to be attached to the Reply was “so as to become part of a centralized public record Reggie Fountain can use to further his personal ends, easily accessible via the Business Court’s website.”Op. ¶22.

The Judge let the Plaintiff dictate what would be stricken from the Defendant’s Reply, ordering that the Plaintiff’s version of the Reply would be the version considered as the case went forward.  Plaintiff submitted with its Motion filed on September 9, 2011 as Exhibit A a redlined copy of the Reply proposed by the Defendant.  It’s not very often (like never) that an opposing party gets to control what the other side’s pleading will say.