Royce v. Needle et al

Filing 269

Amendment to April 19, 2016 Memorandum Opinion and Order - References to $600 on pages 2 and 3 of the opinion should have been $1,300, and the opinion is amended accordingly. Signed by the Honorable Milton I. Shadur on 4/20/2016:Mailed notice(clw, )

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION
MERLE L. ROYCE,
Plaintiff,
v.
MICHAEL R. NEEDLE, P.C., et al.,
Defendants.

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Case No. 15 C 259

AMENDMENT TO APRIL 19, 2016
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
Later in the same day (yesterday, April 19) on which this Court issued a memorandum
opinion and order dealing with several aspects of the disputes between counsel for Merle Royce
and counsel for the "Amari Group" on the one hand and Michael Needle and Michael R. Needle,
P.C. ("Needle, P.C.") on the other, counsel for the Amari Group e-mailed to this Court a brief
letter calling attention to what he labeled as "an inadvertent error" in that opinion. Counsel was
right on both counts -- there was an error and it was inadvertent (though that is no excuse for the
error having been made). This amendment to the opinion addresses that oversight.
Page 2 of the opinion speaks of "a $600 sanction imposed on Needle, P.C. on October 19,
2015," and page 3 repeats the $600 figure. As the letter from the Amari Group's counsel
accurately reflects, that amount covered only the portion of the October 19 sanction attributable
to Royce's fees, but it failed to take into account the $700 sanction attributable to fees ascribable
to counsel for the Amari Group. Accordingly the references to $600 on pages 2 and 3 of the
opinion should have been $1,300, and the opinion is amended accordingly.
By way of a brief explanation (but not an excuse) as to how the error occurred, the
unusual procedures that have had to be followed since Needle, P.C. has been without counsel

(the use of e-mails rather than simply electronic filings for the transmittal of motions and court
orders) have frequently resulted in the physical delivery of most courtesy copies of the
multitudinous documents to this Court's chambers -- copies that do not bear their docket
numbers, unlike copies of the electronic filings that do. For that reason the identification of
docket numbers in this Court's opinions has sometimes been drawn from a printout that shows
the general nature and the date of each docket entry, rather than from the documents
themselves -- and that is what happened in this instance.
When counsel's corrective letter arrived, this Court went back to the underlying document
and found that the correction was called for. In any event, the error has now been corrected.

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Milton I. Shadur
Senior United States District Judge
Date: April 20, 2016

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