A second federal judge in Atlanta has sanctioned a Buckhead attorney and ordered him to reimburse opposing counsel thousands of dollars in fees—this time for abusing the discovery process by serving last-minute subpoenas for depositions that the judge said were never intended to take place.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Gerrilyn Brill on May 22 directed Robert T. Thompson Jr.—who is also facing a criminal theft by conversion charge in an unrelated Fulton County case—to pay $13,565 to defense lawyers in a two-year-old residential foreclosure case. In her order, the judge said the sanctions stemmed from “untimely and unreasonable requests” by Thompson to depose defense witnesses, some of whom lived out of town, “virtually on the eve of the expiration of the extended discovery period … without any explanation or rationale for doing so.”
