With regard to the attorney-witness issue, the Seventh Circuit did not address the fact that the proceeding before it was not a trial but an appeal from a trial. The Seventh Circuit also did not assert that an attorney-witness rule problem had plagued proceedings before the district court.

Under a “plain meaning” analysis of the attorney-witness rule, one might have thought that if the drafters had intended the attorney-witness rule to apply to appeals as well as to trials, they would have said so. It may therefore be that this decision presages a broader reading of attorney-witness rules than has heretofore prevailed.