Ferland

MEMORANDUM *

Nancy Ferland appeals from the district court’s dismissal of her lawsuit against Terri Braband on the ground that she filed the Braband suit to circumvent a Rule 16 scheduling order in a separate but related case against Braband’s employer. We need not recite the facts, as the parties are familiar with them. We reverse.

The district court abused its discretion by dismissing this action as a sanction for violating a scheduling order in a separate case, even though both lawsuits arise from the same facts. “The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not authorize dismissal of an entirely separate action for violations in a related action.” Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Ry. Co. v. Hercules Inc., 146 F.3d 1071, 1073 (9th Cir.1998).

This case is nearly indistinguishable from Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, differing only in that it involves a permissive joinder of parties under Rule 20, rather than a permissive third-party claim under Rule 14. This distinction is immaterial. Much as the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe court found that a dismissal sanction impermissibly converted the plaintiffs permissive claims in a separate but related lawsuit into compulsory ones, id. at 1074 , in…

Dissenting.

The difference between this case and Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway v. Hercules Inc., 146 F.3d 1071, 1073 (9th Cir.1998), a case of which the district court was well aware, appears to me to be more than my able colleagues acknowledge. Simply put, this is not a Rule 14 case. The district court correctly recognized this difference noting that the current case is more akin to compulsory joinder under Rule 19, as well as the untoward result that double filing would create i.e., prejudice and extra expense. Moreover, the reason for the attempt to file this case as a separate case from the case of which it should have been a part stems from lawyering that fell far short of what is expected from a person adequately schooled in the law. Scheduling orders are necessary to the efficient processing of cases — for everybody. Nowhere in the United States is the workload of our courts more daunting than in the Southern District of California. There was no excuse for missing the scheduling order and for attempting unnecessarily to make two cases out of one. If we are going to accommodate these kinds of inexcusable failures of lawyering, our system will soon sink into…