A friend-of-the-blog dropped by Judge Carney's courtroom to witness yesterday's hearing on Baker Hostetler's motion to withdraw, and phoned the right-of-assembly tip line. So we have a few details to share from the meeting.
In addition, three attorneys filed pro hac vice motions this afternoon, which corroborates our tipster's account.
From this we can conclude that Williams Cohen is local counsel. The new lead counsel replacing Baker Hostetler is New York firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink. The litigation team will be Roberta Kaplan, Gabrielle Tenzer, and David Shieh. Judge Carney is said to have said,
I was ready to give a trial date of March 10, with a pretrial conference of March 2. Can you be ready to go to trial in March?...My thinking is that this is only going to get resolved by trial...Is there any reasonable possibility that this case can settle? With the Central District being down nine judges, trial time is very precious...But if we're going to have a trial, let's go...I'm going to assume you're not going to settle."
But the proposed March date did not work for Cooley, and Kaplan Hecker was hoping for a later date. Judge Carney says summer is not available. So now we await the judge's order later this week setting a trial date.