Star Navigation Systems Group (Star) pushed its latest court duel with AeroMechanical Services (AMA) into the spotlight recently only to find the court pull the plug.

Just to remind readers, the latest litigation began when Star's former president, Hilary Vieira sued Star. Star counter sued and added AMA as a defendant. AMA then sued Star and Star's Chairman & CEO, Viraf Kapadia, plus Star insider, Peter Verbeek, for $20 million.

The case has been slowly winding its way through the litigation process in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Brampton, Ontario.

It got bogged down when the key executives of both AMA and Star were in what is called examination for discovery - where Star lawyers get to grill AMA executives behind closed doors and AMA lawyers grill Star executives, all in preparation for a trial.

The first public report on this came from Star in a Dec. 10th news release wherein Star wrote that it would seek a court motion forcing AMA Chairman & CEO Bill Tempany to answer questions he had refused to answer. In addition, Star wrote that it would also ask the court to force Mr. Tempany to cover his own expenses while providing those answers.

Star appeared to be taking a very aggressive stance before it added that AMA was seeking a similar court motion to force Mr. Kapadia to answer questions he had previously refused to answer.

And here is how it all looked when it came out of the courtroom door.

The various motions were heard by Justice Andrew Goodman on Dec. 13th and AMA's lawyer reported that in response to its motion against Star, Star answered or has agreed to answer all outstanding questions.

Justice Andrew Goodman gave Star until March 14th to do just that.

On the other hand, the court dismissed Star's motion to force Mr. Tempany to answer outstanding questions, according to AMA's lawyer.

In addition, Justice Goodman then ordered Star to pay $9,000 to AMA to cover AMA's costs of this proceeding.

And a new trial date of April 29th, 2011 was set.

Looking further back in history, Star also filed a challenge to AMA's patent. The U. S. patent office rejected that challenge in March, 2009.

About the same time, Star also filed a patent infringement lawsuit against AMA in the United States, which Star itself abandoned.