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BLACK v. WARD11/10/1993
mpleted by August 26, 1988, and required the parties to designate expert witnesses sufficiently early within the discovery period to allow the other side time to take discovery and to designate expert witnesses of their own. Plaintiff failed to designate an expert witness prior to the entry of summary judgment against her. She now argues that because her appeal was pending in the Law Court, the time period set in the discovery order had no effect. However, even after the case was remanded to the trial court in November 1988, she did nothing to prosecute her action for a period of almost two years. Although the discovery deadlines contained in the pretrial scheduling order were effectively suspended when Black first appealed to this Court and were not autonatically reinstated when the case was remanded, the Superior Court retained the inherent power to limit further discovery in a case that had been pending for three and a half years and been dormant for 23 months. Prior to the hearing on defendant's second motion for a summary judgment in February 1991, plaintiff again failed to designate any expert, arguing instead that she was not bound by the prior discovery order. It was not until the pretrial conference on the eve of trial that plaintiff first made known to defendant the name of her proposed standard of care expert. In these circumstances, the court's decisions to exclude plaintiff's expert witnesses and to refuse to compel a reply to interrogatories do not constitute abuses of discretion.
The entry is:
Judgment affirmed.
All concurring.
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