A motion in limine is usually described as housekeeping — a tidy-up of the evidence list before the jury is brought in. That description does the work a disservice. By the time the first witness is sworn, the shape of the case has been set by a handful of rulings about what may be mentioned, and a trial plan that has not accounted for those rulings is a plan for a different trial.
We draft these motions early, often while discovery is still running. The purpose is not to surprise anyone. It is to force ourselves to decide, in writing and in front of a judge, which facts we intend to prove and which we can live without. That exercise tends to shorten the witness list on its own.
It also changes how we take depositions. A lawyer who knows which document will be contested at trial asks about its creation rather than its contents, and the transcript that results is the one that gets attached to the motion six months later.
None of this is novel. It is simply earlier than most schedules require, and being early is the whole of the advantage.
