A Trial Date Timed to Blow Up a Clinic Sale Mid-Closing

The situation

The motion arrived on a Thursday afternoon, ten days before a closing that had taken the better part of a year to arrange. Jomar's counsel asked the court to fix trial dates for the following month, a two-week block that, once mapped against the calendar, landed directly on top of the week the sale of Jae-won's clinic chain was scheduled to close. It was framed as an ordinary scheduling request, the kind either side is entitled to make when a case has been sitting without a trial date for too long. It was not ordinary, and everyone reading it understood exactly what it was meant to do.

Ha-eun, a surgeon, had invested in the clinic chain several years earlier alongside Jae-won, who owned and operated it, taking a minority stake while continuing her own surgical practice separately and staying largely uninvolved in day-to-day operations. Jomar had been a third investor in the early years before exiting the business, and the lawsuit alleged that Ha-eun and Jae-won had misrepresented the chain's financial performance to induce Jomar's original investment, seeking damages that, combined with the value Jomar claimed his stake should have grown to, ran into seven figures.

The lawsuit itself had been working through the usual stages for over a year, with productions exchanged, examinations completed, and a trial expected to run several weeks given the volume of financial evidence and the number of expert witnesses each side intended to call. What changed was the timing of Jomar's scheduling motion, filed once his counsel learned, through public reporting on the pending sale, that the clinic chain was days away from closing a transaction worth substantially more than the claim itself, to a buyer that had spent months on due diligence.

A trial date landing inside that closing week threatened more than an inconvenient calendar clash. Buyers in a transaction of that size typically want assurance that pending litigation will not disrupt the business they are acquiring, and a trial actively underway, with Jae-won and Ha-eun both needed as witnesses for extended stretches, risked spooking the buyer or triggering closing conditions tied to ongoing litigation exposure. Jomar's side knew that. The motion was not really about getting to trial faster. It was about making the closing painful enough that a settlement on Jomar's terms looked easier than fighting it out, and the timing made that intention hard to miss.

The complication

The underlying complication was a genuine one, separate from the timing games being played around it. The case was, on its merits, a long trial. Both sides intended to call forensic accounting experts to walk through years of financial statements, along with several witnesses to speak to what was and was not disclosed to Jomar at the time of his original investment. Realistically, a trial of that scope needed somewhere between three and four weeks of court time, which is not the kind of block a busy trial court can simply produce on short notice.

That created a real scheduling problem even without Jomar's motion. Courts allocate long trials against a limited number of available weeks, often many months out, and a block that size is genuinely hard to find, particularly one that does not conflict with other matters already set down. Jomar's proposed dates exploited that scarcity: by asking for the earliest available block, which happened to land on the closing week, his side could argue with a straight face that they were simply moving the case along, while knowing the timing would land at the worst possible moment for the other side.

Ha-eun's own schedule added another layer. As a practicing surgeon, she had a fixed surgical roster booked months in advance, and being pulled into a multi-week trial on short notice would have meant cancelling patient procedures that could not simply be rebooked around a court date. That was a genuine hardship, but on its own it is rarely enough to move a trial date; courts expect litigants and their witnesses to arrange their schedules around fixed trial dates, not the other way around, absent something more compelling.

The stronger argument had to be built around the length of the trial itself rather than around anyone's personal inconvenience. A three-to-four-week trial does not need to run as a single unbroken block. Courts do, in appropriate cases, split long trials across two separate sittings when doing so lets the case be heard sooner overall and fits more naturally around the court's existing calendar, provided the gap between sittings does not prejudice either side's ability to present a coherent case.

What we did

1. Opposed the scheduling motion on its own terms first. Before proposing any alternative, we filed materials showing the proposed dates fell inside the closing week and argued that fixing trial dates without regard to a transaction of that magnitude, known to the other side, was neither reasonable nor consistent with how scheduling motions are meant to work, and asked the court to look past the neutral framing of the request.
2. Proposed splitting the trial into two sittings rather than simply asking for a delay. Instead of arguing only that the closing-week dates should be scrapped, we offered the court a constructive alternative: an initial sitting before the closing to deal with the financial evidence and expert testimony, and a second sitting afterward to complete witness testimony and closing arguments, so the case would still move forward on a defined timeline.
3. Worked with the court's scheduling office to identify realistic available blocks. We canvassed several potential date ranges on both sides of the closing, checking availability for the expert witnesses, opposing counsel, and the court itself, so the proposal we put forward was genuinely workable rather than aspirational, and could not be dismissed as a delay tactic dressed up as a compromise.
4. Built the evidentiary record showing why the closing-week dates caused real prejudice. We put before the court concrete evidence about the transaction's status, including the closing conditions tied to pending litigation exposure, to show the timing was not a minor inconvenience but a real risk to a legitimate business transaction unrelated to the litigation's merits and predating the lawsuit itself.
5. Coordinated expert witness availability around the proposed split. Splitting a trial across two sittings only works if the same experts and key witnesses remain available for both, so we confirmed in advance that our forensic accounting expert and factual witnesses could commit to both blocks before putting the proposal forward, avoiding a scenario where the split created its own scheduling problem later.
6. Kept the closing itself moving on a separate track. While the scheduling dispute was argued, we worked with Jae-won's transaction counsel to keep the buyer informed, within what the confidentiality terms allowed, that the litigation schedule was being actively managed, which mattered to keeping the deal on its own timeline without the buyer's counsel treating the lawsuit as an open-ended risk.
7. Argued the motion on the basis of trial management, not personal hardship. Rather than lead with Ha-eun's surgical schedule, we framed the split-sitting proposal as the more efficient way to manage a genuinely long trial, which was the argument most likely to succeed regardless of how sympathetic any individual witness's calendar was, since courts are generally reluctant to reshape a schedule around one party's convenience alone.
8. Prepared both clients for the possibility the motion could fail. We were candid with Ha-eun and Jae-won from the outset that scheduling motions are decided at the court's discretion and that no outcome could be promised, and built a contingency plan for managing the closing around the original dates in case the split-sitting proposal was not accepted, so a refusal would not have left the transaction team scrambling without a plan of its own.

The outcome

The court adopted the split-sitting approach, scheduling the first block of the trial to begin shortly after the closing had completed and a second block roughly two months later to finish the evidence and hear closing arguments. The closing-week dates Jomar's side had proposed were not used. The transaction closed on its original timeline, without the buyer's counsel raising the pending litigation as a live concern, because there was, by the time of closing, a clear trial schedule in place rather than an active trial disrupting the sale during the very week the parties needed everyone's attention on the deal.

The trial itself, heard across the two sittings several weeks apart, resulted in a clear win. The financial evidence and expert testimony supported Ha-eun and Jae-won's account of what had been disclosed to Jomar at the time of his investment, and the claim of misrepresentation was dismissed in its entirety. The gap between the two sittings did not weaken the case; if anything, it gave both sides time to sharpen their closing positions once all the evidence was in, and the court's written decision addressed the full record coherently despite the trial having run in two parts months apart.

What the scheduling fight ultimately protected was not just a court date but a business transaction worth many times the value of the claim itself. Had the trial proceeded during closing week as proposed, the disruption alone, regardless of the eventual result on the merits, could have cost Jae-won and Ha-eun far more than anything at stake in the lawsuit, through a collapsed or renegotiated sale rather than through the litigation itself. The split-sitting outcome let the legal process run its course on its own timeline, without becoming a tool for pressuring an unrelated business decision, and left both the transaction and the eventual trial result intact.

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