More and more courts are imposing time limits for trial. In fact, courts impose time limits in some of the largest trials ever. As The National Law Journal reported on Feb. 20 in “Judge Keeps Tight Leash in BP Litigation,” U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans “tighten[ed] the scope” of the first of three trial phases in the litigation over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, ensuring, as one observer noted, “a compact trial.”
Given this trend, litigators in garden-variety cases should use caution when seeking open-ended trials from judges who may have imposed strict limits on much larger, bet-the-company cases.
