Recently, the Colorado Supreme Court handed Wal-Mart a costly defeat in the highly-publicized case of a truck driver whom a jury awarded $15 million due to injuries she incurred from slipping on a grease spill while making a delivery to a Wal-Mart store in Greeley.
The high court reversed the decision of the trial judge, who granted Wal-Mart a new trial, ruling that the driver’s attorneys failed to disclose a key document that unfairly prejudiced the jury.
In a 4-2 decision (with a seventh justice recusing herself), the majority ruled that plaintiffs’ attorneys were not required to disclose the document – a report from the City of Greeley – because it was a “public document . . . equally available to all parties.”
Beneath the radar, however, Justice Monica Marquez — whose nomination to the court received a positive recommendation from CCJL’s Legal Advisory Board — authored a concurring opinion that demonstrated a keen eye for subtle distinctions in the letter of the law.
Marquez concurred in the majority’s decision that Wal-Mart wasn’t entitled to a new trial because, in layman’s terms, its attorneys didn’t ask for a new trial until the jury ruled against them to the tune of $15 million.
“Wal-Mart made a strategic decision to proceed with the trial and abruptly change its defense strategy,” Marquez wrote. “Wal-Mart cannot have it both ways and claim it was deprived of a fair trial now that the jury has returned a verdict against it.”
However, Marquez and Justice Nathan Coats parted company with the majority’s opinion that relevant public documents need not be disclosed to the opposing party.
“Today the majority carves a broad new exception to a party’s mandatory disclosure obligation under (the rule),” she writes, “an exception that . . . finds no support in the plain language of Rule 26.)
“The majority relies on several cases from other jurisdictions. . . . “Upon closer inspection, these cases actually address a party’s obligation to produce publicly available documents; they say nothing of a party’s obligation to disclose.”
Although Justice Marquez reached the same ultimate conclusion as to the outcome of the case, the “rookie” on the court gracefully revealed the sloppiness of the majority’s argument and demonstrated her own rigorous, independent analysis of the law and the facts.
