Steve Quest (p/k/a Montagraph) vs. Nicholas Robert Rekieta & Rekieta Law, LLC (2023)

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Useful_Mistake said:
New entry on appeal
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Monty's lawyer shows the dates he would be unable to do oral arguments
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Randazza filed his version yesterday
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Lubby Smith said:
2. While Colorado's anti-SLAPP is similar to summary judgement, it's really a higher standard that requires the judge to weigh evidence. Summary judgment asks if there's a genuine dispute of fact. If so, the jury decides. If not, the judge grants summary judgement. Colorado's anti-SLAPP asks whether the party can show "a probability of success." Can you win vs are you more than likely going to win. Asking a judge to lay odds on the jury verdict is asking the judge to weigh evidence.
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Okay, fucker, how much were you paid for this?
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Lubby Smith said:
Nick knew he could be governed by Minnesota law, and he had no idea that Colorado law would be implicated because (as far as I know) he didn't know where Monty lived. Now he's trying to take advantage of Colorado law and escape Minnesota law.
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All jokes aside, this was very well written. I think this might be Quest's lawyers best work yet in this case. It reads shorter than it is, easy to read, and doesn't feel like a raving schizophrenic (that this is a factor at all, shows how bad Randazza was last time) wrote it I still feel like Randazza will win on this issue, though.
 
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JCDenthog said:
Hello Kiwis sorry for the delay on the documents life stuff happened and I couldn't find the time I thought I had. Here's the documents.
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I like this brief. There is nothing fancy about it.

In fact, it states its argument in the very first text you'll read in it, in as few words as possible:
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This is textbook btw. As the appellee, you generally do not want to adopt novel arguments. You want to address the opinion of the court below and pound on that and say "THIS!" Unless the court below massively fucked up, that is generally your strategy. And it almost always works.

The obvious problem with this is while the trial court somewhat glibly just said this statute is more or less identical to the statute in Colorado, that's not quite the case. It actually has a few differences. However, this brief addresses those differences and argues the similarities are on exactly the points that made the Minnesota statute unconstitutional, which I agree with mostly.

I also recognize the SCOTUS cases in the Table of Authorities. The judge probably will, too. These cases are all familiar friends and will not startle anyone.

Then it concludes with an encapsulation of the argument, as it should. And there's an addition after that:
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Boom headshot. Or it should be.

The finale is an absolutely confident statement that not only is this the correct decision, it is so obviously correct it doesn't even deserve to be published and should go down ignominiously as so ludicrous it isn't even setting precedent to affirm the trial court's decision.

While there's no obvious sarcasm or breaches of decorum, there is no real benefit to Quest himself to point out the proper nonprecedential rejection of this appeal, so merely pointing it out at all is pretty much concluding the brief with WTF?

I assume Christopher W. Bowman drafted the bulk of this brief. It's professional, well-formatted, reads well, and while I hate to call things in advance, will probably win. I looked him up. He's a fairly freshly-minted lawyer, but with a pretty distinguished career already.
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Lmao nerd. He looks like exactly the kind of person who is good at appellate law, and it sounds like he actually is:
In addition to his work at the trial-court level, Chris has served as lead appellate counsel before the Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits, the Iowa Supreme Court, and both the Minnesota Court of Appeals and Minnesota Supreme Court, including multiple issues of first impression and other important questions on a wide range of practice areas, and has consulted or otherwise served as "drop-in" appellate counsel for clients and lawyers around the Country. Chris is also a frequent presenter on appellate topics at CLE Courses.
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I can believe that. There is nothing about this brief that I can even nitpick.

It does exactly what a brief should do. Even if it's from the other side, you should know more after reading it than you did before, and I do, even though I've slightly more than casually examined the issues in this case.

tl;dr I think Nick is about to get F'ed in the A.
 
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It's a good brief, but I still think Monty loses because the CO courts (and the CA courts whose reasoning CO courts adopt regarding the anti-SLAPP statute) explicitly say that judges do not weigh evidence when ruling on anti-SLAPP motions.

The judge uses summary judgment procedure (taking plaintiff's allegations as true, not making credibility determinations, etc) but applies a slightly higher burden of proof than summary judgment (reasonable probability of success). I think the appellate court finds that this is not a jury function, so applying the CO statute would be ok in MN. With that rationale for choosing MN law gone, CO law should apply, imo.
 
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AnOminous said:
I seriously don't get why Minnesota would prefer Colorado law to its own basic constitutional principles.
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The MN statute required the judge to make a "finding of fact" and proof by clear and convincing evidence, which is literally what the jury would be doing. That's what made the MN statute unconstitutional. I don't think they'll find that the Colorado statute, which doesn't allow for weighing evidence and requires a much lower burden of proof, violates the MN constitutional right to trial by jury.

And if that's the case, I think they'll fall back on the normal choice of law in defamation under the old lex loci rule and both restatements, which is the plaintiff's domicile, ie where the injury took place to the plaintiff's reputation.
 
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John Andrews Stan said:
Not as retarded as thinking Randazza is the webmaster of his firm’s site.
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He either has oversight of the content that is posted, which makes him retarded. Or he doesn't have any oversight of the content that is posted, which makes him retarded. Either way the point still stands.

In the case of J.A.S. Vs Laughing at Cancerman I find in favor of the defendants.
 
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Spaded Dave said:
He either has oversight of the content that is posted, which makes him retarded. Or he doesn't have any oversight of the content that is posted, which makes him retarded.
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The CEO of a company typically doesn’t sign off on content because they employ someone else (marketing or PR director) to do that. That shit is way below his pay grade. Maybe his chief of staff/COO hired a retard to do the job, or maybe someone made a mistake. Forgive me for not immediately assuming the worst, knowing how organizations operate.

Randazza is dodgy in multiple ways (getting in bar fights as an adult man and sperging out on Twitter in Italian), but I haven’t seen any evidence that he’s retarded. Or maybe we mean different things when we say retarded. He’s definitely got lolcow qualities like his client here.
 
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