Miri v. AlignerCo Corp. CA1/1

Filed 7/10/25 Miri v. AlignerCo Corp. CA1/1 NOT TO BE PUBLISHED IN OFFICIAL REPORTS California Rules of Court, rule 8.1115(a), prohibits courts and parties from citing or relying on opinions not certified for publication or ordered published, except as specified by rule 8.1115(b). This opinion has not been certified for publication or ordered published for purposes of rule 8.1115.

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

FIRST APPELLATE DISTRICT

DIVISION ONE

SARA MIRI, Plaintiff and Appellant, A172220

v. (Alameda County ALIGNERCO CORP., Super. Ct. No. 23CV030735) Defendant and Respondent.

MEMORANDUM OPINION1 Plaintiff and appellant Sara Miri appeals, in propria persona, from an order imposing terminating sanctions for failure to comply with discovery obligations and the ensuing judgment dismissing her case. In briefing that is lengthy, prolix, and largely in violation of the California Rules of Court, Miri claims the trial court abused its discretion. We affirm. We first address the state of Miri’s briefing. While Miri provides some citations to the record on appeal, much of her text, including most of her 18- page statement of facts set forth on pages 7 through 25 of her opening brief,

We resolve this case by memorandum opinion under California 1

Standards of Judicial Administration section 8.1. We discuss the factual background only briefly as the parties know, or should know, “the facts of the case and its procedural history.” (People v. Garcia (2002) 97 Cal.App.4th 847, 851.)

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includes no record citations. Page 11 of her opening brief, for example, contains not a single citation to the record. Pages 9, 12, and 13 of her opening brief have but a single citation to a single page of the record. In short, the vast majority of the sentences in her statement of facts are unsupported by any citation to the record. “Rule 8.204(a)(1)(C) of the California Rules of Court requires all appellate briefs to ‘[s]upport any reference to a matter in the record by a citation to the volume and page number of the record where the matter appears.’ It is well established that ‘ “[i]f a party fails to support an argument with the necessary citations to the record, . . . the argument [will be] deemed to have been waived. [Citation.]” ’ [Citation.] This rule applies to matters referenced at any point in the brief, not just in the statement of facts.” (Conservatorship of Kevin A. (2015) 240 Cal.App.4th 1241, 1253.) “Rule 8.204(a)(1)(C) [of the California Rules of Court] is intended to enable the reviewing court to locate relevant portions of the record ‘without thumbing through and rereading earlier portions of a brief.’ [Citation.] To provide record citations for alleged facts at some points in a brief, but not at others, frustrates the purpose of that rule, and courts will decline to consider any factual assertion unsupported by record citation at the point where it is asserted.” (Alki Partners, LP v. DB Fund Services, LLC (2016) 4 Cal.App.5th 574, 590, fn. 8.) Given this patent deficiency of Miri’s briefing, we conclude she has waived her multitudinous arguments on appeal. Nevertheless, given the severity of the sanction the trial court ultimately imposed, we have taken a close look at the court’s discovery orders. To begin with, the orders reveal that Miri’s briefing on appeal suffers from another fundamental deficiency, namely that she has not addressed the