Justice Cahn to also judge Team New Zealand's lawsuit against Alinghi

PDF Documents

- Justice Cahn's ex parte order to Team NZ and Alinghi to compel preservation of records

Justice Cahn, the NY State Supreme Court judge in charge of the lawsuit brought by BMW Oracle against Alinghi, will also judge the lawsuit Team New Zealand filed against Ernesto Bertarelli, Alinghi and ACM on Thursday, as the official documents from the NY Supreme Court show (see picture here below).

Team New Zealand filed two lawsuits against Alinghi on Thursday. The first action, filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, "claims damages for breach of contract arising from an agreement made as a pre-condition of ETNZ’s entry to the 33rd America’s Cup". The second action has been filed in the Federal Court under United States anti-trust legislation. Justice Cahn will obviously judge the first case.

One of the first things Justice Cahn did right after Grant Dalton and the team's lawyers filed their papers on Thursday was to issue an "ex parte order to compel preservation of records" (see attached PDF file at the top of the article). I'm not a lawyer, far from it, but just a quick web search is enough to find other cases with such orders. This order basically means that Team New Zealand (the Plaintiff) and Ernesto Bertarelli, Alinghi and ACM (the Defendants) are "restrained from destroying, erasing, mutilating, concealing, altering, transferring, writing over, or otherwise disposing of in any manner, directly or indirectly, any documents or records of any kind that relate to the case".

One is to assume that Justice Cahn will thoroughly examine all these documents in order to judge the case and it should be fair to suppose that this particular case will take much longer to resolve than the one facing BMW Oracle and Alinghi.



You can now follow both cases by simply registering to the eTrack system provided by the NY State Unified Court System. After registering just enter the index of the case you are interested in. For the BMW Oracle vs Alinghi lawsuit it's 602446/2007 and for the new one brought by Team NZ it's 600662/2008. All information will be immediately delivered to your mailbox.

Note: According to Wikipedia, "Ex parte is a Latin legal term meaning "from (by or for) one party" (pronounced /ɛks ˈpɑrteɪ/ or /ɛks ˈpɑrti/ in English). An ex parte decision is one decided by a judge without requiring all of the parties to the controversy to be present."