Not what you say, but how you say it.

A steel-hulled tugboat, owned by Marquette, allided with the fiberglass-hulled SES Ekwata, rendering the Ekwata unusable. In the resulting litigation, the plaintiff won damages and an award of sanctions under the district court’s inherent power. On appeal, “Marquette asserts that the fee award was unwarranted because Marquette had a good faith basis to challenge the quantum of damages and thus in proceeding through a trial. But even if true, this fact did not justify Marquette’s intransigence on liability or the means by which Marquette defended [Plainitff’s] damages claim—namely, one expert who, according to the
district court’s findings, opined on value ‘without including any comparables, without considering the equipment on the vessel, without an accurate description of the vessel, and without reliable underlying information” and a second expert who, according to the district court’s findings, “not only failed to correct the glaringly incorrect information set forth in [the first expert’s] report, but incorporated it into his own.” Accordingly, the Fifth Circuit affirmed. Moench v. Marquette Transp. Co. (revised October 13, 2016).