Patience thins as snark creeps Into receivership fight

#Opinion • 8:27 a.m. Jan. 30, 2026

If tone counts for anything in federal court filings – and it usually does – Thursday’s dueling motions in the ongoing receivership case involving Fawn Weaver’s Uncle Nearest Inc. suggest that patience is wearing thin and tempers are no longer being carefully concealed behind boilerplate legal courtesy.

Two motions filed Jan. 29 – one by a group of non-party companies seeking relief from an accelerated hearing schedule, and the other by the court-appointed receiver, Phillip G. Young Jr., responding to that request – read less like sterile procedural disputes and more like barely restrained eye-rolls committed to paper.

• Receivership fight escalates over timing, transparency

The non-party entities, led by Shelbyville Barrel House BBQ LLC and several affiliated companies, filed what they labeled an Emergency Motion asking the court to reconsider its scheduling order and delay the upcoming hearing on the receiver’s Motion to Clarify. Their argument, stripped to its essentials: We don’t even know what we’re being accused of yet, and we’re somehow supposed to defend ourselves anyway.

The receiver’s response did not so much rebut that claim as sigh audibly in its general direction.

“This response will be brief,” the receiver wrote at the outset, immediately explaining that he did not wish to “further burden the Court,” which, he noted, was already dealing with a “seemingly endless stream of motions for reconsideration, emergency scheduling motions, and the like.” Translation: Here we go again.

From there, the tone sharpened.

The receiver pushed back on any suggestion that the agreed-upon schedule was designed to benefit the non-parties, stating flatly that the timeline was meant to promote judicial efficiency – not to provide strategic advantage. He went further, noting that the movants have “first-hand knowledge” of the financial transfers at issue because, according to the filing, they or their common owners orchestrated them in the first place.

In other words: You know exactly what I’m looking at. Don’t act surprised.

The response also takes a thinly veiled swipe at the core of the movants’ complaint – namely, that they are being forced to prepare without knowing the receiver’s evidence. The receiver says that explanation after explanation has already been offered and that none of them satisfactorily account for what he describes as the “multitude and amount of transfers” between related entities.

“At this point,” the filing essentially concedes, “further discussion would be fruitless.”

The emergency motion, by contrast, has a more formal – but no less pointed – tone. It repeatedly emphasizes that receivership is an “extraordinary” and “extreme” remedy and argues that forcing seven separate companies into a single, compressed hearing verges on procedural absurdity. The movants carefully outline how six hours in court would be insufficient to untangle multiple corporate histories, bank records, regulatory issues, and factual disputes – particularly when the receiver has not publicly identified specific transactions he believes justify expanding the receivership.

There is also a subtle undercurrent of you said one thing, then did another, as the motion devotes considerable space to recounting earlier email exchanges in which the receiver appeared open to reviewing records quietly and withdrawing the issue altogether if nothing concerning emerged.

That context, the movants argue, makes the current posture feel less like efficiency and more like ambush.

The receiver, for his part, rejects that framing entirely. He maintains that he has complied with both the letter and the spirit of prior court orders, has already narrowed his witness list to two individuals, and intends to submit his own testimony by affidavit—another quiet suggestion that this dispute is being made far more complicated than necessary.

Ultimately, both sides agree on only one thing: The court will have to decide.

What remains clear from Thursday’s filings is that the legal fight has moved beyond dry procedural wrangling and into something more human – frustration, defensiveness, and a growing impatience that now shows through even the most carefully worded motions.

And if the court was hoping for calm, orderly efficiency, it instead received a pair of filings that amount to a professional but unmistakable message from both sides:

We’re tired of this – and we want it over.