Free Motion for Extension of Time to File Answer - District Court of Federal Claims - federal

Case 1:07-cv-00272-ECH

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IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF FEDERAL CLAIMS MARK G. ABBEY, et al., Plaintiffs, v. THE UNITED STATES, Defendant. ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )

No. 07-272C (Judge Emily C. Hewitt)

DEFENDANT'S UNOPPOSED MOTION FOR AN ENLARGEMENT OF TIME Defendant respectfully requests an enlargement of time of 29 days, to and including October 4, 2007, within which to file its answer or otherwise respond to the complaint. currently is due on September 5, 2007. Our response

This is our second

request for an enlargement for this purpose; the Court has already granted us an additional 65 days. Plaintiffs' counsel

has authorized us to state that he does not object to this motion. In our initial request for an enlargement of time, we noted that agency counsel needed additional time to research the employment records of the 6,458 plaintiffs involved in this case in order to provide a useful and comprehensive litigation report. Unfortunately, despite agency counsel's good faith estimate of the amount of time necessary to complete this task, the research has not yet been completed. Agency counsel has advised us that researching plaintiffs' employment records has been complicated by the fact that the agency is in the midst of converting all of its official

Case 1:07-cv-00272-ECH

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personnel files to electronic form.

As a result, at any given

moment, a certain number of personnel files are in the process of being scanned and are, therefore, unavailable. Also complicating the records search is the fact that the agency payroll system was changed in the Fall of 2005. that date, payroll was handled within the agency. Prior to

Since that

date, pay has been handled by the Department of the Interior. Because plaintiffs' claims encompass periods of time both before and after the change in the payroll system, searching each plaintiffs' payroll records is doubly time consuming. Finally, because of the extremely large number of plaintiffs in this case, the sheer volume of data that must be processed and reviewed in order to analyze plaintiffs' claims is huge. The

amount of time needed to perform these tasks is extensive. Performance of this work is necessary, however, in order to produce a litigation report that will enable us to prepare a useful and accurate response to the complaint, one based upon facts, rather than upon gross assumptions as would be necessary were we to review less than all the plaintiffs' records. Based upon agency counsel's representations, we anticipate that the additional 29 days requested in this motion for an enlargement of time will be sufficient to allow us to receive the litigation report and to prepare and useful and accurate answer to the complaint. Accordingly, we respectfully request that the

Court grant this motion for an enlargement of time of 29 days, to

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and including October 4, 2007, within which to respond to plaintiffs' complaint. Respectfully submitted, PETER D. KEISLER Assistant Attorney General JEANNE E. DAVIDSON Director S/Hillary A. Stern HILLARY A. STERN Attorney Commercial Litigation Branch Civil Division Department of Justice Attn: Classification Unit 1100 L Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20530 Tele: (202) 616-0177 Facsimile: (202) 305-7643 Attorneys for Defendant August 27, 2007

Case 1:07-cv-00272-ECH

Document 7

Filed 08/28/2007

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