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Szalontai v. Yazbo's Sports Cafe5/26/2005
he project known as "Best Practices," result in a number of significant rule amendments effective September 2000, was undertaken by the Conference of Civil Presiding Judges for the purpose of attempting to improve the efficiency and expedition of the litigation process as well as to restore state-wide uniformity to the wide range of discretionary and increasingly disparate judicial responses to such matters, among others, as the resolution of discovery problems and disputes, the fixing of trial calendars and adjournments of trial dates. The predicate of the project was that by amending the rules to provide for single-judge pretrial case management and by establishing realistic discovery periods according to the nature of each case, a discovery-completion target date could be enforceable, and if enforceable, credible trial dates could be set, ending the general expectation that a case would be reached for trial only after multiple adjournments. The techniques for accomplishing the Best Practice goals address each stage of litigation from filing of the complaint to discovery, to arbitration and to trial. [Pressler, Current N.J. Court Rules, comment 5 on R. 1:1-2.]
Although Rule 4:24-1(c) is of recent vintage, it has already been held that " ecause of the liberalized time for discovery afforded by the tracking system embodied in 'Best Practices,' a heightened standard of 'exceptional circumstances' was adopted for any extension of discovery requested after an arbitration or trial date is fixed." O'Donnell v. Ahmed, 363 N.J. Super. 44, 50 (Law Div. 2003). It is against this backdrop that plaintiff's post-arbitration request to extend an already expired discovery deadline must be gauged.
In this case, plaintiff's request for an extension of the discovery deadline was made not only after both the arbitration and trial date were fixed, but after the arbitration itself had been concluded and an award rendered, and on the very day the trial date was set. Moreover, that request included plaintiff's statement that even his own deposition needed to be taken.
Under those circumstances, we wholly endorse the trial court's rejection of plaintiff's request for an extension of the discovery deadline. In the words of the trial court:
There were no depositions that were taken, there's just the report that was apparently put together by some expert and could have been - - all the information in that report was available before the discovery ending. My concern in allowing discovery to reopen at this point is that we really would be using the arbitration procedure as almost a screening event to figure out where the weaknesses are; and then, after the arbitration, we'll go forward and plug in all the holes in our case, and I just don't think that's what arbitration is for. And I think if I were to allow this to proceed that would be undermining the whole effort of the court system to have discovery concluded prior to the arbitration.
III.
As plaintiff represented time and again in certifications presented to the trial court, plaintiff proceeded as if this were "a classic res ipsa loquitur case." Thus we must examine whether we are presented with, in fact, a classic res ipsa loquitur case, that is, whether plaintiff adduced sufficient proofs at trial to invoke that doctrine. In doing so, we analyze separately plaintiff's claims against the property owner/operator defendants from those pressed against the entity that performed the underground storage tank decommissioning and filling work. We address first the limits of the doctrine.
A.
Brown v. Racquet Club of Bricktown, 95 N.J. 280, 288-89 (1984), describes the application of the res i
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