Comment by eutropia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eutropia | Hacker News Reader

(IANAL) Tether was trying to claim that requesting essentially a complete financial report for Tether and Bitfinex was overbroad, but has so far refused to produce any example of a more specific and limited set of information, so the court said "open your books":

  ...In the absence of agreement between the parties (id., Ex. 1 at 5
  ("Plaintiffs remain open to considering an alternate proposal ... but
  cannot do without some indications of what the B/T Defendants intend to
  produce[.]")), the Court finds that Plaintiffs' financial records RFPs
  are not overly broad, particularly given that Defendants have had
  opportunities to make sample productions of the financial records RFPs,
  but have failed to do so despite Plaintiffs' agreement to such proposal
  (id., Ex. 1 at 5). Plaintiffs plainly explain why they need this
  information: to assess the backing of USDT with US dollars, and to
  allow a forensic accountant to assess the USDT reserve...
  
  The documents sought in the transactions RFPs appear to go to one of
  Plaintiffs' core allegations: that the B/T Defendants engaged in
  cyptocommodities transactions using unbacked USDT, and that those
  transactions "were strategically timed to inflate the market."...

  Accordingly, the Court ORDERS the B/T Defendants to produce documents in
  line with the revised RFPs 22-25, 29, 31, and 72

I found this format of a court order to be rather unique. I've never before seen a court order that reproduces a document from the docket (#245), and appends the actual order (with no header or anything) to the end.

I've seen some that are a letter from one side, and the judge has scribbled a note at the top accepting it and signed that.

It's normal[1] to give a judge a proposed order they just have to sign.

Judges don't have to care about formatting and headers. Each judge generally gets to write their own rules for how they want lawyers to format filings in their cases.

[1] Or at least I often see them when browsing through cases as an interested layperson and I've heard lawyers discussing doing it in a tone that suggests it's the norm.

you're right, in fact in California state courts it's required to submit a proposed order with a motion.

But no, each judge generally does NOT get to write their own rules of formatting. Districts (at the federal level) go to great lengths to ensure that things are uniform in that jurisdiction, for the ease of the clerk's office. Someone looking at this PDF would likely not immediately know it was an order. State courts are even more uniform, with statewide rules on typeface, font size, margin width, whether something must or can be included in a single document or broken out into a separate filing, number of lines of empty space at the top of a page, etc etc

Certainly proposed orders are very normal, especially (but not exclusively) if a resolution has been agreed to by both parties (e.g. settlement, or order by mutual stipulation).

But this was very much not that. A proposed order would match what was being argued in the attached brief, and this did pretty much the exact opposite, rejecting the arguments in the attached letter.

I've been practicing for 28 years across the country, admitted in two states and nine federal district courts. I've never seen an order like this and in fact have never seen a judge permit a "letter brief" like the original filing. (I suspect this is an SDNY quirk.)

Not saying there's anything improper about it, but it looks really bizarre to me. Why the judge didn't have one of her clerks slap it into a Word document with a short caption and file that on ECF is totally beyond me. And as a matter of style, it seems amateurish and haphazard.

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