Opinion ID: 2325365
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Hearing on Harodite's Motion to Amend

Text: On May 6, 2009, a hearing on Harodite's motion to amend was held in the Superior Court. As an initial matter, the hearing justice specifically declined to address the futility argument raised by Warren Electric in its objection to the motion to amend; she observed that, due to the fact that neither party had filed a motion seeking to have the court determine whether a Massachusetts or a Rhode Island statute of limitations would be applicable, she was not going to engage in such an analysis and was not going to apply the doctrine of futility on the basis of the statute of limitations. In assessing Harodite's motion to amend, the hearing justice expressly noted that the proposed amendments significantly changed the nature of the case; she observed in pertinent part as follows: [T]his completely changes the nature of the case because you've been proceeding along since 2005 on the theory that it was the size of the gasket that caused the failure of the preheater. Now you're going to have to look at the preheater as a whole, consider the state-of-the-art in preheaters at the time this was designed, at the time it was built. You're going to have to do discovery on what it would have takenwhat the best fail safe would have been, what it would have taken to engineer a modification, whether that was cost effective. This is completely open, [a] new field. And then when you get to this question of the warning, same thing. (Emphasis added.) In response, Harodite argued that the warning argument arises as a result of the defense that was put forth in the supplemental answers to interrogatories that were served on March 26th of this year [ i.e., 2009]. [15] Accordingly, in Harodite's view, its new failure-to-warn allegation was based on that defense. Harodite's contention was that, if Warren Electric was telling [Harodite] that [its] product [could] overheat to such an extent that it can cause its own gasket to fail, then it followed that Warren Electric should have provided a warning   . In the end, the hearing justice denied Harodite's motion to amend. She predicated her ruling on (1) the extent to which the proposed amendments altered the nature of the case and (2) the case's proximity to trial. [16] In concluding her ruling, the hearing justice stated in pertinent part as follows: [I]f you think you have claims   , [then file]    an additional complaint. But, I'm not going to derail this trial date and send the case back to ground zero.    [S]ince you're making new factual allegations, they're entitled to propound all new interrogatories and to get new reports and get new expert disclosure. They're not required to take a look at the old discovery and try to piece together how that might apply to these new contentions. I can't do it, and I wouldn't do it even if this thing was maybe three years down the road. On May 22, 2009, an order entered denying plaintiff's motion to amend its complaint. E