Daggers Fly In Court Filings Over Legal Tactics In East Hampton Airport Lawsuits

One of the groups of plaintiffs in the gaggle of lawsuits challenging East Hampton Town’s attempts to impose new restrictions on flights into East Hampton Airport has asked a judge to kick the town’s two main attorneys off the case.

The town’s attorneys, in turn, accused the plaintiffs’ attorney of blatantly misleading the judge in the case and, in doing so, jeopardizing the reputations and careers of two attorneys based on what they said was “conjecture” about trivial secretarial errors, something they said was an irresponsible effort to hamstring his opponents’ legal representation — a tack the plaintiffs had attempted and failed at once already.

James Catterson, of the firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, who represents a group of airport hangar owners and Montauk residents who oppose the town’s proposed flight restrictions, filed a motion in court last week asking that the judge handling the case, Paul J. Baisley, revoke the “pro hac vice” approval for out-of-state lawyers to participate in a New York lawsuit issued to the California-based aviation specialists that the town hired in 2017 to guide its efforts to rein in aircraft noise.

Catterson’s motion claims that the attorneys, Bill O’Connor and Andrew Barr of the giant international legal firm Cooley LLP, intentionally cut out a component of a letter from a federal aviation official in a submission to the court in the case, that the attorneys made false statements in court about the town’s intentions with regard to the airport, and that the notary stamps on their applications to participate in the case were made electronically by a notary only authorized to make in-person notarizations. The motion suggests that the attorneys committed fraud and possibly perjury and should possibly face “civil and criminal liability.”

In his 23-page motion, Catterson said he feels “duty bound” to raise the issue of O’Connor’s and Barr’s role in the case because, he claims, the town’s attorneys submitted “deliberately doctored” documents as part of the case — pointing to the June submission of two letters from an Federal Aviation Administration official to the town from which the final three lines of the letter were cut off.

“Mr. O’Connor’s and Mr. Barr’s conduct throughout this litigation flies in the face of the legal standards of New York and raises ethical concerns that warrants the revocation of the privilege of pro hac vice admissions,” Catterson wrote. “Since the outset of this litigation, they have evidenced both their lack of knowledge of and disregard for New York practice and this court’s authority.”

In their own 26-page response to the motion, the Cooley attorneys called Catterson’s claims “trivial” and “utterly meritless,” and his attempt to get them removed from the case an “abusive” attempt at gamesmanship to gain advantage over the town’s legal team based on “unsupported conjecture” about minor clerical errors.

It also accused Catterson, personally, of knowingly attempting to mislead the judge in the case, State Supreme Court Justice Paul J. Baisley, about submissions from the Cooley attorneys and by presenting statements they made in a wholly and knowingly false context.

“It is troubling that, whether through intent or carelessness, [Catterson] failed to tell the court that the documents they claim were ‘deliberately doctored’ — and which in fact were merely incorrectly redacted — have been on file with this court, unreacted, since May 4, completely undermining the claim that town counsel sought to mislead anyone,” the Cooley response reads. “Instead of checking their facts, petitioners plowed ahead with this motion as an ‘abusive’ and ‘tactical weapon’ to prejudice the town.

“Petitioners claim that they felt ‘duty bound’ to bring this motion, but no duty compels this inappropriate filing,” the town’s attorneys response continues. “To the contrary, Rule of Professional Conduct makes clear that ‘lawyers are required … to inform themselves about the facts of their clients’ cases … and determine that they can make good faith arguments before making them in court.”

O’Connor also spotlighted a previous attempt by Catterson to claim that the town could not use airport funds to pay for its legal battles over the facility’s management and said that the plaintiffs are clearly attempting to use gamesmanship to hamstring the town’s fair legal representation.

“[The plaintiffs and their attorney] have already tried to cut the town off from its counsel by drafting a proposed [temporary restraining order] … to prevent the town from paying its counsel,” the Cooley attorneys said in one footnote. “Now aware that they did not understand the relevant federal law … petitioners shift to inappropriately attacking Mr. O’Connor and Mr. Barr personally without regard for the far-reaching impact such baseless accusations could have on their reputations and livelihoods.”

The primary accusation against O’Connor and Barr by Catterson was based on the submission of the two FAA letters, which omitted the last sentence and signature of the official who penned them, Diogenes Ramos.

Catterson said that the final sentence was cut off because Ramos said that the town would have to email her to confirm their intention to “deactivate” East Hampton Airport on May 17.

But O’Connor, in his response, claims that the submitted version of the letter was taken from the town’s website, as the attorneys had routinely done when compiling many of the town documents they have submitted in the case. When the town had posted the letter to the website months earlier, the final sentence and signature that contained Ramos’s direct phone number and email and been removed as a courtesy to the FAA official. The clerk who uploaded the document from the town website had not realized it was not the full text of the letter, they attorneys said.

Likewise, with the issue of the notarizations, they told the court they had no way of knowing that the secretary who had notarized their submissions — a California-based secretary who was working remotely from Colorado due to COVID precautions — was not certified to make electronic notarizations.

The plaintiffs’ attorney also claimed in his motion that Barr had told a federal judge on May 17 that the town and its attorneys would not be appealing for relief from the TRO that Baisley had issued earlier that day.

“That representation lasted barely longer than it took to leave the courthouse,” Catterson wrote in his arguments, saying that the town appealed for relief from the TRO the following afternoon. “Mr. Barr’s false statement are either a purposeful deceit or demonstrate a total lack of awareness of the local rules.”

But the Cooley attorneys say that Catterson knowingly took Barr’s statements out of context and misrepresented to Baisley the steps that the town’s attorneys took to make them seem duplicitous, when in fact they were related to a different case and that circumstances changed when the FAA informed the town that the deactivation of the airport was irreversible, and that a “major safety issue” had been created by the court’s restraining order blocking the airport transition to a new, private airport.

The town appealed, seeking permission to go forward with the activation of the new airport while agreeing not to implement the new restrictions it had proposed until their power to do so was settled in court.

The town’s attorneys noted that the plaintiffs in the federal case, the National Business Aviation Association, had never raised any objections to the steps the town took with regard to the appeal, and that it was only the East End Hangers’ attorney who had drummed up the matter as an offensive tactic — one that should fail in the balance of a judge’s hands, they said.

“Petitioner’s argument is irresponsibly false,” O’Connor wrote in the town’s response. “They continue to misrepresent the record and waste everyone’s time and resources.”