HUGO VARGAS v. MIKE MCMILLAN - Michael Murphy, we believe, is the attorney for the defendant in this matter based on Los Angeles County court case summary records listing him and his law firm as defense counsel of record.

From the tentative ruling this is what happened:

Attorney Michael Murphy represented the defendants in this case.

One of the defendants served discovery on plaintiff consisting of a request to produce documents and written questions to answer.

Plaintiff provided answers on November 13, 2017.

If Murphy contended an objection was improper or a response was not complete, he had about 45 days to file a motion to compel.

This is basic discovery law even a first year attorney should know.

Attorney Murphy then served a request for plaintiff to "supplement" his prior discovery responses with any later acquired information.

Mike Murphy blew the time to file motions to compel the original discovery. He filed his motions on February 13, 2018, well after the deadline to claim a response was inadequate.

Attorney Murphy apparently knew he missed his deadline, so the motions he filed were only directed to the supplemental discovery.

The judge made quick work of this incompetence.

First, the court noted Michael C. Murphy, Esq., missed his deadline to file a motion to compel a further response to the original discovery.

Second, the judge said the information sought was not acquired after the original responses so there was nothing to supplement.

The end result is Michael Murphy loses.

In our opinion attorney Murphy should have known not to file these motions.

Then it gets worse ...

From the ruling it appears what Murphy really wanted was a government issued right-to-sue letter to the plaintiff.

Hmmm. After incomptently missing the deadline to fie a motion, and then incompetently filing a loser of a motion, perhaps the attorney could have simply got the letter from the government agency?

Or, since it appears to us from the court summary and order that there were three defendants, but only one filed the motion, that one of the other two defendants could serve discovery asking for the document.

Problem solved.

It would have prevented the judge from hammering Murphy for $1960 in sanctions for filing baseless motions.

Why were the sanctions only against the defendant?

No. The tentative ruling says defendant and his counsel of record are jointly being sanctioned. Although the attorney represents the client it seems obvious this is an attorney problem and we imagine that is who will be paying the sanctions.



Would you hire Michael C. Murphy to be your attorney?

There are concerns. The problem is not just that a motion was lost, but first - Murphy missed the deadline to file a motion to compel the original discovery. Second, for what Murphy did file a motion for plaintiff had properly answered. There was no basis for the motion.

The malfeasance is multi-layered and with our possible solutions one has to wonder what attorney Murphy was thinking.

The following was provided by attorney Michael Murphy:

"The article you published about the sanctions award against me and my law firm is not accurate and misleading. We served the discovery on plaintiff. He responded he did not have the information. We served him with the information he needed to answer our interrogatories on his loss of income claim in response to his discovery requests.

We then served supplemental interrogatories on plaintiff to provide us with supplemental responses after receiving the information he needed from us to disclose his claim for loss of income. The plaintiff did not timely respond or object to the supplemental interrogatories and refused to provide the responses after a meet and confer.

We properly brought a motion to compel. The court ignored the waiver by plaintiff of their objections to the supplemental interrogatories. The court incorrectly ruled that if we did not bring a motion to compel to the original interrogatories we could not bring the motion to compel as to the supplemental interrogatories which is not the law on a motion to compel. Otherwise, you could never bring an independent motion to compel on supplemental interrogatories.

I had a court reporter at the hearing. The judge could not provide a legitimate basis for his ruling but refused to change it. We were contemplating bringing a writ of mandate with the court of appeal. However, due to the costs, we decided to simply pay the sanctions award with our client not paying it and proceeding with other methods to obtain the discovery.

As for the right to sue letter, it turns out after we obtained a court order, the plaintiff did not obtain a timely right to sue letter and as a result of a court order we got to compel him to produce the letter the plaintiff dismissed his FEHA claim and right to recover attorney's fees. In a companion case consolidated with this case, the plaintiff produced his right to sue letter which was defective. We won a motion for summary adjudication of issues and had that FEHA claim and that plaintiff lost the right to recover attorneys fees.

After Judge Otero ruled on our motion and awarded sanctions, he left Department B. His rulings were terrible and many lawyers complained about him. He was letting plaintiffs slide and avoid their discovery obligations and failed to properly interpret the discovery statutes properly and liberally as required by the case law.

After the current judge came in and took over the cases in Department B, he has done a great job properly handling our law and motion proceedings. We obtained numerous court rulings compelling discovery by plaintiffs. Please add this clarification to the article about us."

Michael C. Murphy was admitted to the California Bar in 1981. Bar Number 104872.

Law Offices of Michael C Murphy
2625 Townsgate Road Suite 330
Westlake Village, California 91361

Law School: Southwestern University