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Meta In Judge’s Crosshairs Over Brief With ‘Excessive Footnotes’

By  |  July 3, 2022

A federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered attorneys for Meta Platforms to refile a brief after he found they violated a court rule against “excessive footnotes.”

US District Judge James Boasberg, who has a track record of enforcing the rule, chided the lawyers from Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick.

They are representing Meta, formerly Facebook, in an antitrust lawsuit filed against the tech company by the Federal Trade Commission.
They had filed a brief in Boasberg’s court on Thursday that included 19 footnotes, the longest of which was over 150 words. The judge said the filing appeared to be an “effort to circumvent page limits.”

The Kellogg Hansen lawyers quickly filed a new version of the brief on Friday that contained no footnotes. Mark Hansen, an attorney with the firm who signed the brief, did not immediately return a request for comment.

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