Shelly Albaum
Aug 23, 2019
The parties have filed "Motions in Limine," which are evidentiary motions, in California. The purpose of the motions is to prevent the other side from showing certain evidence to the jury.
The rules on the admissibility of evidence are complicated, but sometimes the calculation turns on something more commonsense, like whether the evidence is more relevant and helpful, or is it more likely to be inflammatory and irrelevant.
For example, in a breach of contract case involving an oil company, evidence that the oil company had been responsible for devastating oil spills that contaminated the environment would be both irrelevant and highly prejudicial, and therefore would likely be excluded.
But if the case were not about a breach of contract, but instead were about the violation of some other environmental law, maybe the evidence, still prejudicial, would be more relevant.
In our case, the parties are mostly trying to get each other's expert witness testimony thrown out, but they are also trying to exclude evidence as unduly prejudicial.
Specifically,
ChromaDex would like to exclude testimony from Elysium's Damages expert, Iain Cockburn, and would also like to exclude (1) Evidence related to the Honig/Brauser/Frost investigations; (2) Characterizations of a spreadsheet as a "fraudulent spreadsheet," and (3) Evidence that ChromaDex refunded royalties in a failed attempt to moot Elysium's Patent Misuse Claim.
Elysium would like to exclude (1) Testimony from ChromaDex's Damages expert, Lance Gunderson, (2) Testimony relating to Acetimide from expert Carla Kagle, and (3) Evidence of personal conduct by Elysium personnel that would be "highly prejudicial" to Elysium. The highly prejudicial personal conduct was revealed in text messages inadvertently produced by Elysium.
You can read the motions here:
ChromaDex's Motion to Exclude Testimony of Iain Cockburn
Exhibits 1-11 in Support of Motion
ChromaDex's Motion to Exclude Thee Other Things
Exhibits 1-8 in Support of Motion
Elysium's Motion to Exclude Testimony of Lance Gunderson
Exhibit A (Email from Dellinger to Guarente)
Exhibit B (Emails & CoA re initial order in 2014)
Exhibit C (Early emails between Morris and Elysium)
Exhibit D (Morris email while at Elysium)
Exhibit E (Gunderson Deposition)
Exhibit F (Alminana Deposition)
Elysium's Motion to Exclude Testimony of Carla Kagel
Exhibit A (Acetamide test results)
Exhibit B (Letter from Cooley re Discovery)
Exhibit C (Aaron Erickson Deposition)
Elysium's Motion to Exclude Personal Conduct Evidence
I normally would summarize these and try to make sense of them, and flag whether some of the arguments were really bullshit.
I might try, yet. But it's awfully difficult to know when the key information is redacted, as in the Personal Conduct Evidence. And I think the Opposition Briefs will sharpen the issues quite substantially when they come in.
So for now, I'm just going to make this information available for people to draw their own conclusions and peruse the exhibits. I might weigh in a little bit later.