Practitioner Insights

Holiday Garnish(ment): What Happens in Court on Christmas Day?

Trellis Research

Yuletide merriment was once a crime. 

In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted the Penalty for Keeping Christmas. The self-governing colony, led by a small group of Puritans, viewed gathering, garnishing, and gifting as more than harmless fun. Such acts, they argued, dishonored God, promoted disorderly behavior, and undermined the colony’s strict moral code. Anyone caught celebrating Christmas, whether through festing or resting from work, could be fined five shillings per offense. Any sign of observance was punishable. 

While Christmas is no longer forbidden, the holiday still lives under a quiet kind of supervision, maintaining a complicated relationship with the law and its enforcement. Using Trellis, the largest state trial court intelligence platform, we can see how that supervision actually plays out, not through appellate doctrine or abstract rules, but through the everyday decisions about when and how people choose to litigate.

There are plenty of cases about Christmas. But an equally interesting story lies elsewhere. The law doesn’t need to ban Christmas in order to drain its spirit. It just has to keep moving. To see this story clearly, we’ll follow the litigants who set the docket in motion on Christmas Day. With each court filing that comes into view, we’ll watch as the cases cluster into an unusual pattern, a shape seen on no other day of the year.

What legal issues arise around Christmas? 

Today, Christmas survives, but the courts set practical limits on holiday revelry, drawing the lines between seasonal festivity and actionable annoyance. Typically, these lines get worked out through nuisance claims, many of which seek to rein in the excessiveness of a neighbor by challenging anything that is too loud, too bright, too disruptive. 

A nuisance arises when someone does something that substantially and unreasonably interferes with the rights of another. The specific elements vary slightly from state to state, but the basic structure mirrors familiar tort principles (County of Santa Clara v. Atlantic Richfield Co. (2006) 137 Cal.App.4th 292, 318). Depending on who is affected, nuisance claims fall into two categories: public or private. 

A public nuisance touches the entire community at once. In Florida, the City of Plantation tried to make that case against Mark and Kathy Hyatt, a couple whose Christmas display turned their suburban cul-de-sac into a seasonal spectacle. The crowds grew. The traffic thickened. The neighbors complained. But the case collapsed. The Hon. Marina Garcia-Wood pinned the obstruction on the city’s own traffic controls, not the decorations. 

Cases about Christmas show how state trial courts set the practical limits on its celebration. But another story runs alongside them, one that comes not from doctrine, but from the strategic decisions of litigants themselves. To see that story, we have to look at the filings that appear on Christmas Day.

What cases get filed on Christmas Day? 

If nuisance disputes reveal the slow burn behind holiday excess, the Christmas Day docket records the cases that refuse to wait. The filings that land on the 25th of December are the matters that break through the holiday lull, marking the moments when the law asserts itself against the calendar. 

The cases are ordinary enough. In 2023, a homeowners association in Delray Beach, Florida, petitioned the 15th Judicial Circuit Court for post-judgment attorney’s fees and costs, a holiday coda to a case sparked by cars parked on a lawn. A year later, in California, a drywall technician filed a personal injury lawsuit against his client, an attempt to hold her accountable after falling onto a bucket. On that same day, in Pennsylvania, a corporate landlord in Pittsburgh initiated eviction proceedings against a tenant and her disabled son for alleged lease violations. Are these our modern-day Scrooges? 

Let’s stay in California and see what Christmas Day filings look like up close. On any given day, approximately 19,000 cases are filed across the state. Yet, on Christmas, the docket is nearly barren. This makes the numbers easy to add up.

According to Trellis, the largest repository of state trial court data, only 26 cases have been filed on Christmas Day in California since 2014. We see small pops of activity scattered throughout the state, with Sacramento leading the way. The filings, which appear across urban, suburban, and rural courts, do not map neatly onto population size, suggesting that local practices may influence the docket more than raw court volume. 

When we pull back the wrapping on these filings, we quickly learn that creditor actions dominate the day. Unbothered by the symbolic weight of the holiday, big banks and debt collectors are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all the cases filed on Christmas Day. Everything else barely registers by comparison. This is interesting, as it’s a complete inversion of a typical court docket. Consider, as an example, the filings on November 18, 2025, an ordinary day pulled at random. Across the above-mentioned counties, creditor actions encompassed 9 percent of the docket, completely overshadowed by torts (45 percent), commercial (16 percent), and labor and employment (10 percent) actions. The holiday skews toward a particular kind of transgressor, with debtors rising to the top of Santa’s ledger. It’s a Christmas story that only state trial court data can tell.

Why study the timing of court filings? 

Timed to the brightest lights, Christmas Day filings give us a rare view into civil litigation. As we trim the docket, it becomes easy to see how the legal system operates—who moves it, and why. The players, now quick to spot, lay bare the small, intentional decisions that would otherwise remain hidden in the noise of a larger, busier court calendar. 

A Christmas Day filing invites many interpretations. It might point to the urgency of a claim, an account that can’t wait, a debt cycle that won’t pause. It might reflect an automated process, the steady churn of an internal workflow that runs day-and-night without human intervention. Or, it might signal something else entirely—a calculated move, a litigation posture that treats the calendar as an opening for procedural advantage. What’s interesting, then, isn’t the presence of Christmas Day filings. It’s that someone—or something—chose this moment to advance their claim, whether that was for exigency, expedience, or leverage. 

In the case of Christmas, we learn a little something about how creditors move, how debt portfolios are managed, and how timing can function as a tactical advantage. Holiday filings can exploit procedural quiet to compress response windows and nudge stagnant matters forward. However, if we know that Christmas Day filings tend to cluster around certain types of actions, then we can anticipate moves that might otherwise catch our clients off guard. And, for partners managing heavy caseloads, recognizing when certain filings spike—especially on the days when no one expects them—can guide staffing, planning, and communication practices. A seasonal anomaly is now a strategic asset, surfacing litigation patterns that never make it into judicial doctrines or appellate case law. 

The tension of holiday garnish(ment)

As the world moves through its rituals of garland and gratitude, the legal system maintains its own steady rhythm—filing new complaints, issuing new summons, posting new orders. Yuletide merriment no longer faces legal prohibition. It now encounters something much colder: procedural indifference. Amidst this indifference, the soft pause of the holiday sets itself against the hard continuity of legal obligations. The garnish that celebrates what is freely given will be met with the garnishment that takes back what is long overdue. Somewhere out there, a courthouse server logs the next complaint. Nothing to mark the moment except the time. 

This piece is a part of our Clause for Celebration series, where we unwrap the strange, funny, and unexpected court cases that pop up whenever a holiday rolls around. 

The Case of Fowl Play: Who’s Liable for Hunting Accidents This Thanksgiving? 

Trellis Research

Understanding negligence, liability, and case law in a turkey hunt

While personal injury claims involving hunting accidents are rare, they are not unique. A successful claim, like any other, requires proof of duty, breach, and causation. A plaintiff must show that a duty of care was owed, that this duty was breached by falling below a standard of care, and that this breach directly caused an injury. 

Turkey hunters have a legal duty to other hunters to not shoot them.  An individual can be held liable for injuries caused by accidental shootings if they fail to follow established safety standards. The standard of care in a hunting accident remains that of ordinary prudence under the circumstances (Mikula v. Dubila, 94 AD2d 503 [4th Dept 1983]). In New York, this means a hunter must act as a reasonably prudent person, ensuring that they positively identify their target and avoid unnecessary risk (De Ryss v. N.Y. Cent. R.R. Co., 275 N.Y. 85, 9 N.E.2d 788 [1937]). If a hunter shoots before confirming what they saw, then they may be responsible for the injuries that follow. 

This article examines three hunting mishaps in New York, tracing how courts assess liability when one hunter mistakes another for game. Along the way, it considers what these accidents reveal about the value of state trial court data in strategic legal research. Legal researchers, after all, typically encounter the law through appellate decisions. These decisions shape our sense of what the law is, even though they capture only a fraction of how it’s actually practiced. This is because most hunting accidents—like most civil cases—never reach appeal, leaving us to wonder: is there a better way to observe the law in motion—to see what really happens when things go wrong in the woods?

What causes most turkey hunting injuries? 

Most turkey hunting injuries occur when hunters accidentally shoot one another, often because they’ve misidentified a hunter as game. According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 78 percent of turkey hunting injuries between 1989 and 1995 involved one hunter mistaking another hunter for a turkey. 

Common risk factors include: 

  1. stalking too closely;
  2. wearing colors that blend with turkey plumage; 
  3. failing to positively identify a target before shooting.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission highlights the third factor as the most important, emphasizing that most accidents happen when hunters fire on sounds, movement, or flashes of color without confirming the target. As we will see, this factor is also how most turkey hunting accidents make their way into our courtrooms.

How do courts determine liability in turkey hunting accidents? 

Access to court records is essential for evaluating cases, drafting motions, and shaping effective litigation strategy. Appellate decisions are the court records most readily available to legal researchers. They provide clear, structured answers to legal questions, and they are often accompanied by trial-level documents, transcripts, and exhibits relevant to the issues under review. 

Appellate opinions play an instrumental role in shaping our understanding of what the law should be. So, let’s start there, with a case from the Fourth Department of the Appellate Division in New York.

According to appellate case law, what happens after someone gets shot during the pursuit of prey? How is liability determined in a turkey hunting accident? 

Appellate case study: Jacobs v. Kent (2003)

It’s the turn of the century. As global anxieties about Y2K clear the air, James Kent fires into dense brush after hearing a gobble and seeing a flash of red. But it wasn’t a turkey he hit—it was Neil Jacobs, another hunter. 

There are many factors that go into determining whether or not a hunter is legally liable for a hunting accident. Liability hinges on the details of the incident, with negligence being a key factor in determining fault. Did Kent act as a reasonably prudent person under the circumstances? The answer, according to Jacobs, is no. In his filing, Jacobs argued that turkey hunters should not shoot until they clearly see the whole turkey and are able to ascertain its gender. Here, the Fourth Department of the Appellate Division found a triable issue of fact. A jury trial, not a motion for summary judgment, should decide if Kent failed to follow that rule. 

Why go beyond appellate opinions when researching liability? 

The doctrine of stare decisis promises consistency, holding that similar hunting accident cases should be decided in a similar manner. The problem, however, is that not every hunting accident raises the same legal questions with the same material facts. In a trial court, those differences can add up quickly. Pressed for time, judges face shifting narratives, imperfect information, and fast-moving dockets, all of which can produce divergent outcomes even when the legal issues appear to match. 

Hunters misidentify turkeys. Judges misidentify the law. Both operate under uncertainty. The decisions that emerge from that uncertainty often stay in the trial courts, never entering the bodies of published case law on which we rely. This is partly a problem of numbers. Appellate rulings represent only a small fraction of all legal proceedings. As such, they fail to capture information about the cases most representative of our legal system—the thousands of cases that move through our trial courts every single day. 

Since most cases never make it to appeal, we rarely get to see how trial court judges think about specific legal issues, how they actually apply the law in real time. This leaves legal practitioners with a selective visibility: we can see doctrine, but not the process that creates it. So, then, let’s consider two case studies of turkey hunting lawsuits to help us understand liability at the trial court level in New York. The first case, nearly 16 years old, emerged before the widespread digitization of state trial court records. The second, a more recent case, can be found on Trellis, the largest state trial court intelligence platform. 

Case Study 1: When the trial record is missing

Two hunters. One Call. One shot. It was May 31, 2008, in Fulton County, at the very end of turkey season in the Mohawk Valley. Christopher Ackerknecht was shot by Mark Lane, a fellow hunter, during a turkey hunt. The incident occurred after Ackerknecht used a turkey call to lure game. Lane, mistaking the sound for a real turkey, fired a 12-gauge shotgun, striking Ackerknecht with 28 pellets. Ackerknecht suffered permanent injuries, including disfigurement and internal damage, eventually filing a lawsuit against Lane in the Fulton County Court. 

The case went to trial, but there’s almost nothing left of it—no filings, no motions, no opinions readily available for us to access. The only easily accessible information about this case comes from two news articles published by the Daily Gazette. According to Jim McGuire, the journalist who reported on the case, Lane’s deposition, which was presented during the trial, quotes him as saying he was certain he observed a tom turkey fanning his tail feathers. McGuire then takes us to a verdict. After two days of deliberations, a jury found Lane 66 percent responsible for the injury, awarding Ackerknecht $25,000. 

Two columns of local reporting are the only records of a trial that turned on a single, mistaken shot. The Ackerknecht case illustrates the challenges of legal research at the state trial court level, where the absence of digitized records often leaves journalists to act as local court archivists. Because of McGuire, we know a little something about the causes of action, the material facts, and the jury’s verdict, but these are just highlights, not actionable insights. We need the details. Where do those live? 

Case Study 2: A fully traceable trial court case

A decade later, on another morning in May, Michael Pachan was turkey hunting in Lockport alongside his friend, Robert, when he was shot by Scott Brown, another turkey hunter, with a 12-gauge shotgun. Pachan sustained serious bodily injuries and filed a case in the Niagara County Supreme Court. I found this case on Trellis, a searchable archive of state trial court records. I can read through the initial pleadings as well as the dispositive motions, the memoranda of law, the deposition transcripts, and the pre-trial rulings. I can start to gather the granular details. 

Unlike the Ackerknecht case, this one lives on in full color. Not only can we reconstruct what happened, but we can also revisit how the court interpreted that moment of (un)certainty before the shot. In his deposition, Pachan recounts the moment things went wrong: 

I could see the path take a 90-degree turn. As Rob approached that turn, he came to an immediate stop. And—and I immediately thought, he sees a turkey. So I stopped. And all I had to do was lean forward to get past him. I didn’t take a step forward. I just leaned forward. And, I mean, I probably had the look of surprise … Sure enough, there was a turkey down that path. So Rob took a step back. I took a step back. He slowly turned to me and leaned into my face and goes, I think that’s a turkey decoy. I go, what do you mean? There’s another hunter here? Boom. That’s what happens.

Pachan’s legal team filed a motion for summary judgment. According to Pachan, after he was struck, Brown appeared beside him saying, “I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe that I did that.” His legal team argued that Brown was negligent as a matter of law, as he failed to confirm that the object he shot at, Pachan, was not a turkey. 

During his own deposition, Brown confirmed that he shot Pachan. But he also thickens the plot. 

And then I looked to the left a little bit and I saw something black. So I started looking at it and I go, that’s a big male turkey all puffed up—or he’s not puffed up. He’s just smart and he’s standing there. He came out onto the edge of the brush and he was standing, like, just inside the brush looking that way. And that’s what I saw. So I sat there for like probably another ten seconds and all of a sudden the black bag—or whatever you want to call it—the turkey—which I thought was the turkey—turned and started to go back in the brush. I pulled up and shot.

…

Well, I saw—I saw the whole thing. I saw the black with the—because turkeys’ heads turn white in the spring. So I saw white, I saw the—the colors. I saw everything.

…

My intention was to shoot the turkey, but it ended up not being a turkey.

Unlike the Ackerknecht case, we can see the questions opposing counsel asks. We can see how they’re ordered, styled, and framed. We can also see how the defense uses their client’s responses to build a resemblance between this case and the Jacobs case, underscoring how both involve defendants who believed they saw male turkeys and fired, only to hit a person. It’s hardly surprising that the judge on record, following the moves of the Fourth Department, was persuaded to deny Pachan’s motion for summary judgment. What is surprising are the things we learn about the players: the strategies they favor, the angles they press hardest, the subtle ways they shape the record to strengthen their narrative. These are the tactics that never make into case law. 

Why is trial court data critical for legal research? 

Attorneys build their arguments on appellate decisions. These are the published artifacts of law, neatly reasoned and edited for citation. These opinions provide guidance on the laws that should apply and how the courts should interpret them. However, appellate opinions represent only a fraction of the system that produces them. 

Every appellate opinion begins life as a trial court case. Most of these cases end quietly, never ascending to the clean air of appellate review. Thus, the sample of cases available for study remains small. The attorneys litigating the Pachan case struck gold with Jacobs v. Kent, an appellate case with uncanny parallels. But what happens when there isn’t a relevant case on appeal? Must we turn to the notes of a local reporter? 

Trellis, as the largest state trial court intelligence platform, brings attorneys back into the trial courts, into the actual rooms where the legal system lives and breathes. Here, we get to see the real volume of legal life long before any case makes it into a newspaper or finds itself cited on appeal. In these rooms, next to all of the dispositive motions, the evidentiary exhibits, and the overloaded calendars, the focus isn’t always on how the law should apply. In these rooms, the law isn’t resolved so much as it’s practiced, tested, and decided. 

If these hunting accidents teach us anything, let it be that misperception has its consequences. Whether in the brush of the woods or the stacks of case law, it’s easy to mistake what’s visible for what’s representative. So, in the case of fowl play, let’s look beyond the surface of appellate opinions and flashes of color. Let’s study the law and the chase as it actually operates—imperfectly, contingently, and inconsistently.

This piece is a part of our Clause for Celebration series, where we unwrap the strange, funny, and unexpected court cases that pop up whenever a holiday rolls around. 

Beyond the Brief: Streamlining Litigation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence (pub. Beverly Hills Bar Association)

Nicole Clark

As Featured in Beverly Hills Bar Association “Modern Lawyer” February 2025

Civil litigation is flooded with busy work. In 2020, a survey of general counsel published by Juro and Wilson Sonsini found that 67 percent of in-house attorneys at fast-growth companies felt buried in low-value work. And, for outside counsel, the problem only gets bigger. This same survey found that one-third of the largest law firms spend nearly one of every three hours on low-value tasks. Whether they’re rummaging for motion templates, extracting key facts from a complaint, or drafting case assessments for a client, many litigation attorneys find themselves processing the law rather than practicing it. How, then, can these attorneys return to litigation—to tackling, in a people-focused manner, the complex legal issues affecting their clients?

From Files to Algorithms

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to a specific technological assemblage, one built to simulate human intelligence in machines. Initially developed in the 1950s, AI systems now leverage sophisticated algorithms to sift through large datasets, identifying patterns, making predictions, and recommending actions. The technology is everywhere. Our email providers use it to quarantine incoming messages into designated spam folders. Our search engines use it to reformulate our queries for more relevant search results.

These applications rely on extractive AI, a branch of AI designed to pull out information from a text and answer specific questions about its contents. This is the kind of AI that has powered contemporary civil litigation. It’s the kind that comes ready-baked into every single legal research and analytics platform. Extractive AI enables attorneys to quickly sift through thousands of court records in a single sitting, automating the compilation of strategic insights about judges and parties, expert witnesses and law firms, case outcomes and settlement amounts. This is the technology that has helped litigation attorneys identify the patterns and the trends informing the direction of each and every case. A great example of this technology is used in eDiscovery.

But there is also another type of AI, one that is a much more recent, much more uncharted, technology. Generative AI is a form of AI that deploys machine learning models to create new outputs. These new outputs are inspired by—rather than fully reliant on—an existing dataset. First formulated in the 1960s, generative AI entered into popular culture upon the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. The world suddenly witnessed how large language models can perform statistical analyses of language use, applying the patterns learned from training datasets to produce novel written content at lightning speed. On that day, the entire playing field changed within every single service sector. Legal research and analytics platforms took note.

A Case in Point

Imagine you are a labor and employment attorney. A client reaches out to you, asking if you can represent them in a wrongful termination claim filed by a disgruntled ex-employee. You start by reading the complaint. Then the long process of creating a strategy beings. Understanding each causes of action and for each, the relevant claimed facts. Next the long research begins with finding similar cases and supportive case law, all must be as relevant to your cases as possible.  After all of that, you might feel ready enough to devise a discovery plan. Quickly, though, because you still need to distill all of this information into a case assessment for your client.

Now, imagine doing this for the 50 or more other cases you currently have pending. In this context, litigation attorneys are left to either sink or swim. Legal research and analytics platforms have responded to these challenges by broadening their scope and applying new generative AI technologies to their archives of trial court data. The result? The automation of routine research and writing tasks. These platforms now offer a wide variety of one-click work products, everything from multi documents timeline creation to drafted arguments and case assessments. These work products are made possible through a blend of (1) meticulously curated trial court case data, (2) commercially available large language models, and (3) proprietary AI technologies, all of which combine to support litigation attorneys within the exact court systems where their cases are filed.

Motion Drafting

“Firms are also using [generative AI] like a sparring partner or a brainstorm idea generator,” explains Ken Crutchfield, vice president and general manager of legal markets at Wolters Kluwer. Consider, as an example, a motion drafting tool, a device that can help an attorney with something like a motion for summary judgment. After uploading the complaint into the system, the tool will identify all of the relevant details and facts about the case. It will then locate similar cases from a database containing hundreds of thousands of successful trial court motions, pulling out every relevant motion for summary judgment it can find. The tool will then draft a tailored motion, incorporating the most successful arguments and the most relevant case law from the most similar cases—tweaking everything to accommodate the specific facts of your case.

As an MSJ that can take nearly a month to produce, a one-click draft of a motion for summary judgment can save weeks of work. This is, perhaps, why 39 percent of law firm leaders named drafting documents as one of the ways their firms plan to use AI technologies. The goal of these productivity tools is to generate space for creativity. In a matter of minutes, a litigation attorney can generate a working draft of a motion for summary judgment, leaving them room to stretch the molds that have constrained conventional legal argumentation. That is to say, litigation attorneys now have the time to experiment with all of those analogous—but not directly related—precedents, interpreting and applying the seemingly irrelevant or otherwise overlooked elements of case law in new and meaningful ways. “I see this as a tremendously exciting time in our profession,” begins Ilona Logvinova, associate general counsel at McKinsey & Company. “It releases that time to let us do more creative, tailored, and innovative work that will allow us to ramp up our expertise and craft unique value.”

Case Assessment

“I use [generative AI] all the time to help me have the first go of things if I’m creating the business case for something,” explains James Arnold, head of legal project management at Dentons. While it’s important to examine how AI technologies are helping litigation attorneys obtain desired case outcomes, it’s equally as important to consider how these same technologies are shaping the client experience. Clients want to know that you understand their world and their industry, that your insights align with what they have experienced. More often than not, this means minimizing their litigation spending and exposure, all within an environment where it can be notoriously difficult to predict when a lawsuit may arise, how long it may last, and how costly it may be.

Litigation attorneys periodically author case assessments to help their clients navigate through this murky, complex, and unpredictable landscape. As a work product, a case assessment typically communicates general case information, providing a complate case strategy from sumamrizing the complaint and listing the causes of action and claimed facts, to key witnesses and missing facts, to relevant strategy, jury pool information, and suggested next steps. The document will typically conclude by outlining the next steps of the litigation process and identifying any necessary deadlines, litigation holds, or discovery procedures. While all of this information is crucial to communicate to a client, it places litigation attorneys in a taxing metasphere, where they are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time summarizing their work process rather than performing it. What if things could be different?

Generative AI is now in a position to fulfill these general narration tasks. Legal research and analytics platforms have trained their large language models to produce original case assessments in response to a given complaint. Sophisticated versions of these assessments go beyond summarizing the document. They also articulate that which is missing, identifying the elements—whether it be a party, a witness, a document—that would be crucial for solidifying a legal claim. By doing so, generative AI technologies are helping litigation attorneys communicate the strengths and weaknesses of an action, providing analyses that are essential to the development of potential defense strategies and the estimation of their costs. “As of today, it’s an amazing personal productivity tool,” begins William Gaus, chief innovation officer at Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders. “We want to leverage that in overall operations of the firm and overall delivery of legal services from the firm.”

Concluding Thoughts

AI is having its moment. According to Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, it’s “one of the most consequential technologies of our times.” The advances in both extractive AI and generative AI are quickly rearranging our relationships with nearly everything and everyone in the world. For the legal sector, the automation of low-value, routine research and writing projects has pushed litigation attorneys to focus their energy and creativity on strategic decision-making and client advocacy tasks, showing us that AI is neither a passing trend nor a harbinger of doom. It is a force-multiplying tool, one that has redefined what it means to practice the law. Echoing the words of Jordan Furlong, “when you can no longer sell the time it takes to achieve a client’s outcome, then you must sell the outcome itself and the client’s experience of getting there.”

Trellis AI is a new legal productivity platform that leverages the largest repository of state court docket data to help litigators evaluate cases, automate brief drafting, suggest winning strategies, and more. Click here to learn more or request a demo today.