The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the granting of summary judgment in favor of our design professional clients. Playing “team ball” with the other designers’ counsel, Deutsch Kerrigan attorneys Juan Miranda and Keith Bergeron received the unpublished per curium affirmation from the Fifth Circuit after they successfully excluded the plaintiffs’ expert witness for noncompliance with F.R.C.P. Rule 26(a)(2)(B) and for failure to comply with the District Court’s case management order. Without the required expert witness, the defense attorneys then promptly moved for summary judgment on the basis that plaintiffs would be unable to prove the standard of care, or breach thereof, in the absence of expert testimony. The Fifth Circuit affirmed that the District Court correctly weighed all of the Rule 37 factors, that the expert’s exclusion was proper, pursuant to F.R.C.P. 37(c)(1), and that summary judgment was proper because the plaintiffs did not comply with the case management order and could not produce the required evidence of how the design professionals breached the applicable standard of care in Louisiana.