Opinion ID: 764874
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Plaintiffs failed to allege a damage claim for breach of

Text: 37 a specific, mandatory duty to prepare case memoranda. 38 The lone potentially troubling requirement among the five on which plaintiffs have focused is found in the RTC's Asset Management and Disposition Manual. It directs employees preparing case memoranda, which are formal written document[s] used to request authorization to take ... action on behalf of the RTC, to compare the proposed action to available alternatives. It specifies that [a]ll the alternatives must be weighed comprehensively and objectively to determine the course of action in the best interest of the RTC. There is some question whether that passage would qualify as a specific and mandatory directive. 11 Even if it does, however, plaintiffs' complaint was deficient because, as discussed below, it did not identify the mere failure to physically prepare case memoranda weighing alternatives as the cause of plaintiffs' injuries. 39 The government denies that this passage is specific and mandatory. It argues that the passage simply provides for alternatives to be 'weighed ...'  and thus implicitly granted RTC discretion to identify the pertinent options and determine the weight to attribute to each. This argument has force insofar as it goes. But the passage does not only concern the discretionary and unquantifiable mental process of weighing alternatives. It also concerns the arguably nondiscretionary and definitely quantifiable physical process of drafting memoranda which weigh alternatives. On review of this Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal, this court must assume that RTC employees did not draft case memoranda seeking authorization for the challenged transactions, or that, if they did, such memoranda failed to identify and weigh alternatives. 40 While the government has ignored the potential significance of a requirement not just to weigh alternatives but to record the process in writing, plaintiffs have ignored it as well. Their complaint did not attribute any harm to the breach of a specific mandate to draft memoranda, as opposed to a failure to perform the discretionary function of weighing options. In that part of their complaint listing specific, mandatory requirements, plaintiffs simply allege that the RTC failed to prepare Case Memoranda in the manner specifically mandated and failed to comprehensively and objectively weigh the alternative actions available to it as specifically mandated. Their complaint then details three of the four liquidation transactions on which plaintiffs focus on appeal. In describing each transaction, the complaint perfunctorily and identically recites that the RTC acted without comprehensively and objectively weighing the alternative actions available to it. Nowhere else in their 28-page complaint or in their response to the government's motion to dismiss did plaintiffs allude in any way to the specific duty to draft case memoranda. 41 After the bald assertion that the RTC failed to prepare memoranda weighing alternatives, the only parts of the complaint which in any way linked that requirement to any particular events or injuries simply alleged that the RTC did not comprehensively and objectively weigh the alternative actions available. The complaint does not suggest that plaintiffs' multi-million-dollar injuries flow from a failure to perform the arguably nondiscretionary function of drafting memoranda listing alternatives, and not from neglect of the discretionary function of comprehensively and objectively weigh[ing] the alternative actions available. Most importantly, plaintiffs have not argued on appeal that the district court should have read their complaint to allege that a failure to memorialize, as opposed to a failure to weigh options, caused their injuries. 42