The battle has officially been joined. More than a year after it began.
With the NFL failing to secure full dismissal of the lawsuit filed against it after terminating the employment of reporter Jim Trotter, the league was required to file a formal response to Trotter’s civil complaint. The document is known as an answer.
PFT has obtained a copy of the document, which was filed on Friday.
The answer is a lengthy but largely mechanical document. The complaint has a series of numbered paragraphs with specific statements and allegations. The defendant, in preparing the answer, responds to each and every numbered paragraph.
In simplest terms, the defendant admits the allegation, denies it, or says it doesn’t have enough information to admit or deny. (Lawyers tend to be more verbose than that.) After responding to each of the numbered paragraphs of the complaint (in Trotter’s case, there are 239 of them), the defendant lists various affirmative defenses.
It’s standard practice, with in this case 18 defenses listed by the NFL. Typically, the lawyer representing the NFL has a standard set of defenses for employment cases, which are copied and pasted into the document prepared specifically in response to the present case.
The goal is to plant a flag as to anything that could come up during the discovery process and to otherwise preserve. the defendant’s rights. It’s far easier to be comprehensive at the outset of the case than to amend the answer later. (Amending the answer isn’t rocket science, but it’s still more cumbersome than putting all of the defenses in the original answer.)
For example, every answer filed by every defendant in every civil lawsuit contains a defense based on the failure of the plaintiff to file the case within the relevant statute of limitations — even when it’s obvious that the case was filed on a timely basis. Also, in every case that seeks punitive damages, the defendant includes a defense that punitive damages are barred by the U.S. Constitution…
Source link : https://www.yahoo.com/news/nfl-files-formal-answer-jim-165617952.html
Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports
Publish date : 2024-07-08 16:56:17
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