Good Olde Fashioned Whistle Blowin' from the Crows Nest
Sea Tow spent the July 7 status report asking the magistrate to send nearly everything upstairs to the district judge. On July 27, he did. Here is who now holds the file — and the thirty-day deadline buried in his published rules that nobody mentioned at the conference.
Six years and three months after Sea Tow Services International sued the franchisees who cooperated with a federal bankruptcy trustee, Magistrate Judge Steven I. Locke held a status conference that lasted from 11:11 a.m. to 11:55 a.m. and sharply narrowed his own role in it.
Fact discovery is closed. Two narrow carve-outs survive. Everything else — the admissibility of a single sentence written by opposing counsel, the fate of three late errata sheets, and the entire summary judgment fight — now belongs to Senior United States District Judge William F. Kuntz II, sitting in Brooklyn.
That is the whole story of Monday, and it is a bigger story than the minute order makes it look.
Read the joint status report filed July 7 — DE 318, five pages, signed by Daniel Gildin of Kaufmann Gildin & Robbins LLP — and one refrain repeats through nearly every disputed section. On the joint defense privilege, Sea Tow's position was that the matter belonged to Judge Kuntz. On the errata sheets, that it should be decided by Judge Kuntz. On the confidentiality designations, that it was yet another issue for Judge Kuntz. On summary judgment, the same again.
Four times in one letter. On July 27, Judge Locke agreed with essentially all of it.
Judge Locke is the judge who, in December 2025, denied Sea Tow's third motion to compel, described its requests as disproportionate to the needs of the case, closed document discovery outright, and found one of Sea Tow's representations about the Jaegers' production to be — in the court's own word — untrue. He is the judge who imposed the ten-deposition limit and warned that the next discovery dispute might cost both sides a special master.
That history is binding, not advisory. This is one continuous action, and the entire docket is the file. Judge Seybert's ECF 216 is law of the case. Judge Locke's discovery orders stand unobjected to and unreviewed. None of it goes anywhere.
What changes is whose eyes are on it. Findings made in a discovery posture do not surface on their own in summary judgment briefing eight months later. They carry weight when a party puts them in front of the court and explains why they matter — which means the record of how this case has been litigated is now, functionally, an argument someone has to make.
If everything now runs through William F. Kuntz II, franchisees reading this docket ought to know who that is.
Senior status is not retirement. Under the federal judiciary's Rule of 80, a judge whose age and years of service total at least eighty may elect it, carry a reduced docket, and keep full judicial authority. The district then gets to fill the seat with a new active judge — which E.D.N.Y. did, seating Judge Merchant in 2023.
Two consequences matter for this case. Senior judges nationally account for roughly a quarter of the civil and criminal cases federal district courts dispose of each year, so this is not a courtesy assignment. And senior judges exercise substantially more control over the composition of their own dockets than active judges do.
A senior judge holding a six-year-old commercial case with a closed fact record is, to a meaningful degree, holding it on purpose — and typically has more hours available per case than an active judge carrying a full criminal calendar alongside a civil one.
For a summary judgment record built out of six years of discovery, that is not a bad draw for anyone.
Judge Kuntz spent more than three decades as a commercial litigator in New York firms before taking the bench. This case is a commercial and statutory dispute between businesses. He has lived the economics of protracted commercial litigation from inside a law firm, which is a different vantage point than a career prosecutor or a public-interest lawyer brings to the same file.
He is not, so far as the public record shows, a franchise-law specialist. Which produces an arrangement worth noting: both sides now field franchise-law boutiques — Kaufmann Gildin & Robbins for Sea Tow, Rosen Karol Salis for the Jaegers — in front of a generalist commercial judge who will be asked to decide questions under the New York Franchise Sales Act.
He also writes at length. His 2018 ruling granting a nationwide temporary injunction against the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians ran to 145 pages and included findings about the motivations behind the government's decision. In 2023 he sentenced the Brooklyn subway shooter to ten concurrent life terms.
We draw no inference from any of that about how he will handle this case, and readers should not either. A judge's prior opinions in unrelated matters predict nothing. We report the record because the record is public and because the man now holds the file.
Here is the part of the handoff that nobody said out loud on July 27.
Judge Kuntz publishes his own Individual Motion Practices and Rules. They are posted on the Eastern District's website, and anyone can read them. Rule III(C) governs summary judgment, and it is short enough to state plainly: no motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56 may be made later than thirty days after discovery has been certified as complete, except for good cause shown — and service of a pre-motion letter within that period constitutes timely service of the motion.
Whether the clock has in fact started is genuinely contestable. Expert disclosures do not close until November 30. Sea Tow's stated position in DE 318 is that summary judgment is premature until expert disclosure is complete. Two of the carve-outs Judge Locke preserved are still open. A party could argue that discovery has not been "certified as complete" in the sense the rule contemplates, and that argument is not frivolous.
But the rule contains its own answer to the uncertainty. A three-page pre-motion letter costs a party almost nothing and, under the rule's own terms, preserves the motion. The Jaegers have been seeking leave to move for summary judgment on liability since February 2025.
Judge Kuntz's published rules require a pre-motion conference before any motion under Rule 12 or Rule 56. The request is a letter of no more than three pages; other parties may, but need not, respond within five business days, also in three pages. Memoranda of law are capped at twenty-five double-spaced pages in twelve-point Times New Roman, replies at ten. Letter briefs are not permitted. Parties set their own briefing schedule and submit it for approval, and no motion paper may be served before the schedule is approved.
There is also a bundling rule — nothing gets filed until the motion is fully briefed — and a requirement that chambers receive a full set of courtesy copies, each marked and identified by docket entry number.
Rule V(A) requires the parties to file a joint pre-trial order within sixty days of discovery being certified complete — unless permission to file a Rule 56 motion has been granted.
So the two tracks are wired together. Grant leave to move for summary judgment, and the trial-preparation clock stops. Deny it, and the case goes onto a trial track immediately.
That is the practical stake in an application that DE 318 describes in a single paragraph.
A privilege dispute that has been running since the Jaegers' December 2021 privilege log came to rest in a place we are not going to pretend to understand.
Judge Locke reduced the whole thing to one question: whether a statement contained in a June 26, 2026 letter from the Jaeger Defendants' counsel is properly admitted at trial. That question goes to the district judge, to be taken up at trial.
What the statement says, why it matters to either side, and what turns on its admission are not apparent from the face of the order, and we are not going to guess at them. When the issue is briefed by people who actually know, we will report what they say.
On June 22, 2026, the Jaegers served a demand they labeled final, seeking five categories of documents. According to DE 318, Sea Tow objected to the entire request as untimely; refused one category outright; produced all requested tax returns notwithstanding the objection; and confirmed that no documents exist for the remaining three.
The refused category is the one that survives to briefing: communications and documents concerning any valuation of comparable top-tier franchise units since 2019, in the context of any potential or actual sale. The Jaegers say their damages expert asked for it.
Sea Tow's response, recorded in the joint letter, is that a spreadsheet — identified as document 2675 — was produced more than four years ago, and that the methodology and multiples it contains for valuing a franchised business remain unchanged to this day. Nothing more, the letter says, should be required.
Judge Locke ordered the single remaining issue briefed on three-page letters: the Jaegers serve August 14, opposition served August 24, both filed with a courtesy copy to chambers August 25.
If you have ever wondered what your territory is actually worth on the company's books — what multiple gets applied, against what revenue base, when a top-tier unit changes hands — the answer being litigated in federal court is a spreadsheet produced in roughly 2022 that the company represents still governs today.
Every franchisee contemplating a sale, a succession plan, or a renewal has an interest in whether that representation holds up under briefing.
Three Sea Tow party deponents sat in March 2026: Mitchell A. Stein, Joseph Frohnhoefer III, and Kristen Frohnhoefer. Transcripts were made available April 15, 2026. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(e) allows thirty days for review and correction, and only where review was requested before the deposition was completed.
The errata sheets were signed, dated, and served on June 23, 2026 — sixty-nine days after the transcripts became available.
Three grounds, per DE 318. First, that none of the three deponents requested review and correction before the close of the deposition, as the rule requires. Second, that service fell outside the thirty-day window. Third — and this is the one worth reading twice — that the errata sheets purport to strike or alter routine stipulations that counsel had already agreed to on the record, including stipulations governing admissibility and use of the transcripts. The Jaegers' position is that a witness cannot undo, by errata, what the lawyers stipulated to at the table. They asked the court to strike the sheets.
That review and correction was in fact requested, though no transcript reflects it. That the changes are stenographic corrections rather than substantive revisions engineered to manufacture factual disputes. That the original testimony remains available for impeachment. That the Jaegers identify no prejudice. Sea Tow cited Podell v. Citicorp Diners Club, 112 F.3d 98 (2d Cir. 1997) and argued that exclusion would elevate form over substance.
Judge Locke resolved the mechanics and only the mechanics: any witness may sign an errata sheet before any disinterested notary public. Whether the errata sheets may be used on summary judgment or at trial goes to the district judge in the appropriate briefing.
The Jaegers asked to strike the errata sheets. They did not get that. What they got is preservation — the substantive objection survives intact and lands in front of Judge Kuntz at exactly the moment it matters most, when those transcripts are being deployed on summary judgment.
Sea Tow, for its part, did not get a ruling that the sheets are valid. It got a signature procedure and a delay.
For the first time in this litigation, there is a hard expert calendar. Case-in-chief disclosures are served September 30, 2026. Rebuttal disclosures are served November 30, 2026.
DE 318 records that the Jaegers have retained a financial and damages expert and disclosed his name and curriculum vitae, and that the expert advised he likely could not produce a report until late September or early October. Judge Locke set September 30 — the tight end of that estimate.
Sea Tow's side of the letter states that the STSI Parties are considering retaining experts on franchise issues and on damages relating to Sea Tow's own claims.
A company that has spent six years and a considerable body of motion practice contesting whether the arrangements it sells are franchises at all is now, by its own counsel's written representation, considering the retention of an expert on franchise issues.
We draw no conclusion. We simply flag that if such an expert is disclosed, the report will be a document in which Sea Tow's retained specialist explains franchise questions in a case where Sea Tow disputes that it operates a franchise system — and that report will be discoverable, deposable, and subject to rebuttal by November 30.
DE 318 raised a second issue under the errata heading that DE 320 does not address at all.
During the March depositions of Stein, Frohnhoefer III, and Kristen Frohnhoefer, the parties agreed the transcripts would be treated as confidential on a temporary basis so the depositions could proceed without interruption. The Jaegers expressly reserved the right to challenge the blanket designation later. Having now reviewed the transcripts, they invoked Section 12 of the Confidentiality Order and asked Sea Tow to identify the specific pages, lines, or discrete portions it contends should remain confidential, with a stated basis for each.
Sea Tow said it was prepared to do so and asked for sixty days.
The minute order is silent. Not granted. Not denied. Not scheduled.
Those three transcripts are where sworn answers exist about the topics this newsletter has been documenting for a year. Whether any portion of that testimony ever becomes part of the public record turns on an issue that was raised in a joint letter, discussed at a forty-four-minute conference, and then not mentioned in the resulting order.
Blanket designations covering an entire transcript are disfavored precisely because they convert a narrow protective mechanism into a general seal. Section 12 exists to force specificity. Nobody has yet been ordered to supply it.
The appearance line on DE 320 reads: for Plaintiff, Mitchell Stein.
That is one week after the most recent Kaufmann Gildin & Robbins appearance was entered on the docket, and roughly four months after Mr. Stein sat for his own deposition on March 16, 2026 — a deposition whose errata sheet is now among the issues routed to the district judge.
The firm's own filings are explicit about the arrangement. The June 29 extension letter, DE 317, signed by Kevin M. Shelley, states that Kaufmann Gildin & Robbins represents the STSI Parties together with Mitchell A. Stein, Esq. Eight days later, DE 318 arrives over Daniel Gildin's signature. Three consecutive filings, three different signatures from the same franchise-law boutique — and at the podium on July 27, the general counsel who is himself a third-party defendant.
Judge Seybert's September 30, 2022 ruling, ECF 216, held that personal liability was adequately pleaded against both Mitchell A. Stein and Joseph Frohnhoefer III. Mr. Stein has been deposed. His errata sheet is contested. His deposition transcript is subject to a blanket confidentiality designation the other side is challenging.
He is also, as of July 27, 2026, the lawyer who appeared for the plaintiff.
Whether that arrangement persists into summary judgment briefing and trial is a question the docket has not yet answered. We raise it as a question. We accuse no one of anything.
These are questions, not allegations. Every one of them is answerable from documents and testimony that already exist. Sworn answers are what a trial is for.
Strip away the procedure and this is what happened on July 27, 2026.
The Jaegers walked out of discovery with their common-interest privilege designations unbroken, the subpoena era behind them, no waiver finding, and the motion they have wanted to file since February 2025 finally unblocked. Judge Nina Morrison denied that application in May 2025 on the sole ground that discovery had not closed. Discovery has now closed. That ground is gone.
What it costs them is money and time at the worst possible point. Expert reports on damages and franchise valuation, an expert deposition, a rebuttal cycle running to November 30, and a trial that cannot realistically occur before 2027 — year seven. That is a real burden on any litigant, and a particular one on litigants whose counsel took the case on contingency against a plaintiff that a federal judge has already found appeared to be attempting to drain their comparatively limited resources.
Sea Tow, meanwhile, got the forum it asked for four separate times in a single letter. Whether that was strategy or simply the correct reading of a magistrate judge's jurisdiction, the effect is the same: the referee who has spent years watching this discovery record accumulate has, by his own order, stepped back from everything that decides the case.
This case has passed through three district judges. Judge Joanna Seybert wrote ECF 216 in September 2022 — the ruling that the arrangement fits comfortably within the statutory definition of a franchise fee, and that personal liability was adequately pleaded against Mitchell A. Stein and Joseph Frohnhoefer III. Judge Nina Morrison entered DE 238 in March 2023 and the May 2025 order that put summary judgment on hold. Judge William F. Kuntz II presides now.
One person has been in this case from the beginning: Magistrate Judge Steven I. Locke. He is the only judicial officer who watched the whole thing happen — the motions to compel, the subpoena campaign, the deposition fights, the representations that did not hold up.
As of July 27, his role is narrowed to a single letter motion.
Every one of those prior rulings remains on the docket and remains binding. That is not the concern. The concern is weight. A finding entered in a discovery order in December 2025 does not announce itself in a summary judgment record eight months later. Judge Kuntz will decide the dispositive questions on the papers the parties choose to put in front of him, and the history of how this case has been conducted will matter exactly as much as somebody makes it matter.
That is not a criticism of anyone. It is how a federal docket works when litigation outlasts the judges assigned to it. But it does mean that six years of accumulated findings are now, for practical purposes, a brief that has to be written.
The next filing that matters is a three-page letter about a spreadsheet. After that, everything is Judge Kuntz's.
Hornswaggled is a work of journalism, commentary, and satire concerning matters of public record and public concern. Satirical characterizations, coinages, and editorial framing are opinion protected under the First Amendment and are not assertions of fact.
This dispatch is drawn from publicly filed documents in Sea Tow Services International, Inc. v. Tampa Bay Marine Recovery, Inc., et al., No. 2:20-cv-02877-WFK-SIL (E.D.N.Y.) — specifically Document 317 (filed 06/29/26), Document 318 (filed 07/07/26), and Document 320 (filed 07/27/26), together with prior orders in the same action. All filings are available through PACER at pacer.uscourts.gov.
Biographical and procedural information concerning Judge Kuntz is drawn entirely from public sources: the Federal Judicial Center's Biographical Directory of Article III Judges; the Individual Motion Practices and Rules of Judge William F. Kuntz, II, as published by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York; and contemporaneous public reporting of his published decisions. Nothing in this dispatch reflects any private communication with the Court, its chambers, or its staff, and no such communication has been sought or had.
Court rules change. The version of Judge Kuntz's individual rules reviewed for this dispatch bears a revision date of January 3, 2024. Any party or counsel acting on a deadline described here must confirm the operative rule and the operative date from the Court's own docket.
Statements attributed to parties or counsel are characterizations of positions taken in court filings, not findings of fact by any tribunal. Questions posed in this dispatch are posed as questions. We accuse no one of a crime. All parties are presumed to be acting lawfully and retain every right and defense available to them.
Nothing here is legal advice. Franchisees, prospective franchisees, and non-parties with questions about their own rights should consult a licensed attorney experienced in franchise law who is not affiliated with any party to this litigation.
This dispatch was prepared with AI assistance from primary source documents. Readers should independently verify all citations, dates, and docket references against the original filings before relying on them.
Hornswaggled corrects errors promptly and in the open. Send documentation to the address below.