Civil Actions II, there are several vehicles for conducting discovery in civil litigation. Types of discovery include written interrogatories, request for admissions, request for production of documents and depositions.
Interrogatories are written questions that you send to another party to determine any evidence or legal arguments that the party may have. Request for Admissions are written statements sent to another party to admit or deny. Request for admissions is used to narrow the legal and factual issues. A Request for Production of Documents is written requests for specific evidence that may be in the possession of another party. Depositions are used after the written discovery to ask any questions about the discovery produced or to further pursue information, evidence and legal arguments.
Be sure to review this week’s resources carefully. You are expected to apply the information from these resources when you prepare your assignments.
Resources for this week:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resources/law_related_education_network/how_courts_work/discovery/
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/formal-discovery-gathering-evidence-lawsuit-29764.html
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/resources/newsletters/young-advocates/propounding-written-discovery-requests/
Instructions
For this assignment, you represent Lt. Jones in his age discrimination claim against the Greenwood Police Department. Please review: Elizabeth Hernandez, Effective Storytelling and Your Discovery Plan, https://www.advocatemagazine.com/article/2019-october/effective-storytelling-and-your-discovery-plan (last visited December 15, 2022).
Next, please create a Discovery Chart or a Discovery Outline similar to Example1 or 2 in the article. Please be sure provide all of the necessary information from your case and identify any evidence still needed and how you plan on obtaining that information.
References: Please use a minimum of 3 legal resources to aid you in developing the discovery strategy and plan.
Scenario:
In January 2012, Chief of Police Brian Williams, of the Greenwood Police Department, announced his retirement. Lt. Tom Jones, who has been with the Greenwood Police Department for 29 years, applied for the position. He was the department’s only Lieutenant, the second-highest rank.
A three-member commission controls hiring and promoting. Between 1990 and 2012, the commission promoted internally, never seeking outside applications for vacancies. This time, the commissioners, recruited both internally and externally and selected four finalists, including Jones and an external candidate, Detective Thompson.
At the time of the application, Jones was 51 years old and Thompson was 38. Jones had an Associate’s degree in law enforcement, and he had completed all professional development training for his position. Thompson had served with the Appleton Police Department for 18 years, reaching the rank of Detective. He had a bachelor’s degree in criminal law.
The commission’s protocol for hiring the Chief was to score three criteria: weighted years of service, training and employment, and an interview. The weighted-years-of-service score counted the candidate’s actual years of police service with double credit for time as Sergeant and triple for Lieutenant.
The training-and-employment score was subjective, with a maximum of 20 points awarded for specialized training, education points awarded for specialized training, education or prior employment relevant to the job of Chief of Police.
As for the interview points, the commissioners rated each candidate’s appearance, greeting, presence, and closure on a scale of 1 to 5, and each candidate’s answers to eight interview questions on a scale of 1 to 10. The maximum interview score was 100 points. The maximum total score for a finalist was about 185.
Before the interview, Jones had a service score of 65—29 years of service, including 8 years as Sergeant and 14 years as Lieutenant—the highest of the finalists. He received 9 out of 20 on training-and-employment, the lowest of the finalists. Thompson received a service score of 28—18 years of service, including 5 years as Detective, which the commission equated to Lieutenant. Thompson scored 15 out of 20 for his training-and-employment, the highest of the finalists. Before the interviews, Jones led with a score of 74; Thompson was second with 43 points.
Each commissioner gave Thompson perfect scores for his interview. Each commissioner gave Jones an identical score of 69. Jones and Thompson thus each had 143 points after the interview, placing them in a tie for the position. The commission hired Thompson as the new Chief of Police for Greenwood.
Attached is the previous assignment that pertain to this case.
MJ-MlS6000-5 Feedback:
Excellent short answer, but we usually qualify in the law – ie Lt. Jones may have a case of age discrimination based upon what appears may be some discrepancies in the scoring process but more investigation will need to be done before we can be sure.
In the statement of facts – you are discussing what he must prove. The facts are just the facts – you are setting up the scenario for your argument.
Analysis of merits and argument are the same thing – you should just have one argument section. But here you are writing a memo for the client to advise them of their possible legal liability so you want to be objective not argumentative. You want to lay out what the law is for the client and then discuss how the facts of this case fit in with the existing case law.
In legal analysis we look for cases with the same/similar facts and how the court decided that case, then we look at the facts in our case to predict how a court might rule in our case. This is what we present to the client. And legal analysis without case law isn’t persuasive, we use secondary resources only when we can’t find primary and there is plenty of age discrimination cases where the winning candidate won because of subjective scoring where the objective scoring was tilted the other way.