Boyle v. Ford (CA2 8/29/14)

One of the reasons for publishing an opinion is to remind people of the law; that was presumably the thinking here so we’ll blog it for the same reason.

The Boyles sued Ford when their truck burned up in their driveway. Ford made an Offer of Judgment; the Boyles did not respond to it and then lost at trial. When Ford moved for Rule 68 sanctions the Boyle’s objected. The trial court awarded sanctions, ruling that the Boyle’s objection was hyper-technical and that they had waived it. It surely was the former; the latter is the basis of this opinion affirming the award.

Rule 68(d) now requires (and has since 2007, though since many lawyers haven’t read rules since they left law school that is recently enough to catch a fair number off guard) that objections to an OJ be filed within ten days on pain of waiver. The Boyles argued that objections must be filed when there are mistakes in the OJ but not when there is some basic defect in it that renders it invalid. But they were apparently making that up almost entirely out of whole cloth without authority; the rule makes no such distinctions. The court holds that the offeree must inform the offeror of “any” objections to the OJ.

(link to opinion)