To be sure, there are issues about which it can be helpful to educate the court early on, even if there's relatively little chance of success on the motion itself. Target Practice: Align Motions with GoalsĪbout those 15 grounds: Be wary of (and careful with) the "shotgun" approach to your motions in limine. And if an omnibus motion is required, package it thoughtfully, be sure that the most important grounds are set forth first, pay extra-careful attention to the relief requested at the end of the motion, and build out a proposed order that makes it easy for the court to provide a clear ruling on each ground. To avoid this frustrating result, if an omnibus motion is not required, consider separately numbered motions together with separately numbered proposed orders (or one proposed order with a line for each separate motion), so that the court's ruling on each motion will be clear to all parties. How many times have you filed or seen filed an omnibus motion in limine with 15 grounds set forth resulting in an order that says, "Motion granted in part and denied in part, as discussed at the hearing." If the hearing wasn't crystal clear about what would come in and what would stay out, that long and expensive omnibus motion may have resulted in relatively little strategic gain- or, even worse, may have generated confusion and uncertainty about how the case could be tried. Think early and often about whether there are particular motions in limine that could and/or should be put before the court well before the crush of pretrial prep arrives. On the flip side of the coin, a loss early on may provide helpful clarity for you and your client about how the court is thinking about the case and the potential trial. Filing important motions in limine well before the deadline-even during discovery, if the grounds for the motion are clear and won’t change-may result in your client gaining an important strategic advantage early in the life of the case. Although we can’t always predict early on all the motions in limine that we will ultimately file, quite often we can predict the most important ones. Instead, we begin thinking about them in the roar to trial, as the deadline to file draws near.īut be careful about waiting this late-that approach could leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Start Early-LiterallyĪlthough limine is the Latin word for threshold, many of us don’t think about our motions in limine at the threshold of a case. This article contains a few tips for making the most of your motions in limine. Yet, often, such motions are underused and underappreciated, or they are prepared in a way that diminishes their impact on the outcome of a case. Experienced trial lawyers know that thanks to motions in limine, trials may be won or lost before they even begin. In practice, however, they are-or at least can be-far, far more. By definition, motions in limine are pretrial evidentiary motions.
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