A new U.S. Fifth Circuit decision involving the Port of Lake Charles offers Louisiana lawyers a fairly remarkable lesson about judicial recusal—and perhaps about what lawyers should be doing at the beginning of a case.
On September 8, 2026, the Fifth Circuit decided IFG Port Holdings, L.L.C. v. Lake Charles Harbor & Terminal District, affirming an order that effectively wiped out a judgment of nearly $125 million. The problem was a relationship that had existed for decades before the trial began. U.S. Magistrate Judge Kathleen Kay presided over the case by consent. Before the parties consented, Judge Kay disclosed that the daughter of IFG’s lead trial lawyer, William Monk, was her law clerk and would be screened from the case. What she did not disclose was the extent of her own relationship with Monk.
According to the Fifth Circuit, Judge Kay, Monk, and their families had shared a close personal friendship for nearly forty years. Monk had been a groomsman in Judge Kay’s wedding. Their children were friends. The families attended dinners and social events together. The Monks once took Judge Kay’s son on a family vacation. Judge Kay officiated the wedding of one of Monk’s daughters. Monk later attended the wedding of Judge Kay’s daughter. Judge Kay and Monk also exchanged texts and Facebook messages over the years.
The Port did not uncover the extent of that relationship until after it lost the case. And here is perhaps the most interesting detail for practicing lawyers: they found it on Facebook. After Judge Kay entered judgment, the Port’s lawyers began investigating. Their wives searched Judge Kay’s public Facebook page and found photographs showing Monk at Judge Kay’s wedding and Judge Kay officiating the wedding of Monk’s daughter. Those photographs became the foundation of the Port’s effort to undo the judgment.
The Fifth Circuit ultimately concluded that Judge Kay’s disclosure about Monk’s daughter working as her law clerk did not tell the Port what it needed to know about Judge Kay’s own relationship with Monk. The question was whether the Port actually knew the nature and extent of that relationship when it consented to proceed before Judge Kay. The district court found that it did not, and the Fifth Circuit found no clear error in that conclusion.
Dissent by Judge Oldham: You Could Have Looked
Judge Andrew Oldham dissented, positing a very different view of the relationship itself. Lawyers and judges in a relatively small legal community like Lake Charles inevitably know one another, attend weddings and social functions, and develop friendships over decades. In his view, the evidence did not establish the sort of extraordinary conflict that justified unwinding years of litigation.
But he also focused on something else: the Port could have investigated earlier. Some of the Port’s own lawyers and their families had overlapping social connections with Judge Kay. The Port knew that Monk’s daughter clerked for her. There was Facebook activity involving people on both sides. And the information ultimately used to challenge the judgment was publicly available.
Judge Oldham was particularly unimpressed that the decisive Facebook investigation occurred only after the Port lost. His dissent warns against a rule that allows parties to ignore available information, litigate the case to judgment, and investigate a possible recusal issue only when the result is unfavorable. His memorable description of what happened here was that the Port’s strategy was either gamesmanship or incompetence that could ultimately be remedied only by “wives with Facebook accounts.”
Because for Louisiana lawyers, developments outside this particular federal case may be moving in the same direction: we may have more responsibility for identifying potential recusal issues ourselves than we have traditionally assumed.
And the ABA Says Lawyers May Have to Speak Up
Earlier this year, we discussed ABA Formal Opinion 522, addressing what a lawyer must do when the lawyer knows information suggesting that the judge may be disqualified. The ABA’s conclusion was important. A lawyer who knows information reasonably likely to trigger a judge’s obligation to consider disqualification cannot necessarily sit silently and leave the problem to the judge. Formal Opinion 522 concludes that Model Rule 8.4(d)’s prohibition against conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice may impose an affirmative obligation on the lawyer to disclose the information, subject to the lawyer’s confidentiality obligations.
The ABA had already addressed the other side of this problem in Formal Opinion 488, concerning judges’ friendships and close personal relationships with lawyers and parties. As we discussed, not every friendship requires disclosure, much less recusal. The nature and closeness of the relationship are the critical inquiries.
Should We Be Looking?
Likely so. Traditionally, lawyers may have tended to think about recusal principally as the judge’s responsibility. The judge knows his or her own relationships. The judge knows the Code of Judicial Conduct. If there is something that needs to be disclosed, the judge will disclose it.
That remains true to an important extent. But it may no longer be the whole answer.
In the state context, Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure article 151 provides as a mandatory ground for recusal that a judge “shall” be recused when there exists a “substantial and objective basis” that would reasonably be expected to prevent the judge from conducting any aspect of the case fairly and impartially–expressly incorporating an objective ground for mandatory recusal and imposing deadlines tied in part to what a party exercising due diligence could have discovered. ABA Formal Opinion 522 tells lawyers that when they do know facts reasonably likely to require judicial disqualification, they may have an affirmative ethical obligation to raise them. And now the Fifth Circuit has given us a case in which publicly available social-media information revealed a decades-long relationship only after a $125 million judgment had been entered.
None of this means that lawyers need to conduct opposition-research dossiers on every judge assigned to every case. Nor does the fact that a judge and lawyer are Facebook friends establish anything by itself. But some basic investigation at the beginning of significant litigation may now be prudent.
