Opinion ID: 740651
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Second Amended Interrogatory Responses

Text: 48 Similarly, the district court did not abuse its discretion in striking Appellants' Second Amended Interrogatory Responses. Appellants' Second Amended Interrogatory Responses challenged several additional statements from the press releases, teleconferences and documents which contained the statements that Appellants challenged in their Amended Interrogatory Answers. Appellants concede that the amended responses contain only information from documents which Appellants have possessed since the inception of the litigation, (Pl.Br. at 40-41 n. 33), and have offered no explanation why the responses which they filed in December 1994 needed to be amended in April 1995 with information that they possessed when they originally filed their responses. Thus, that the Appellants hoped to challenge these statements in the litigation is the only plausible explanation for the amendments. Therefore, the district court properly construed them as a motion for leave to amend the complaint. We review a district court's order denying leave to amend for abuse of discretion. DCD Programs, Ltd. v. Leighton, 833 F.2d 183, 186 (9th Cir.1987). Courts should grant leave to amend only if an amendment will not cause prejudice to the opposing party, is not sought in bad faith and is not futile. Id. (citations omitted). 49 Here, the district court found that allowing the Appellants' amendments would unduly prejudice Appellees because Appellants served the amended interrogatory answers after the court closed discovery and after Appellees filed a very prodigious summary judgment motion and because allowing the amendments would delay further trial of the case which was well into its third year and was set for trial less than three months after the Appellants sought leave to amend. (ER 342:3-4). The court noted that the new statements came from the same documents as the thirty-five statements identified in Appellants' original responses. (Id. at 4). The court found that because Appellants knew about the statements previously, the Appellants exercised undue delay in amending their responses. (Id.) Finally, the court found that Appellants acted in bad faith in seeking to amend because they failed to explain why they had not raised the statements earlier and failed to notify the Appellees of their intention to amend their responses, even though they knew that Appellees intended to move for summary judgment. (Id.) Under these circumstances, the district court did not abuse its discretion in striking Appellants' Second Amended Interrogatory Responses. Kaplan v. Rose, 49 F.3d 1363, 1370 (9th Cir.1994) (denying leave to raise new misstatements where the parties had completed voluminous and protracted discovery, trial was two months away and the plaintiffs had known about the two documents containing the new misstatements since the beginning of the litigation), cert. denied 116 S.Ct. 58 (1995).