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What reports? Even so, ignoring the court and getting a default judgment puts him in a pretty precarious position. If he had lost the case on the merits he could make any discovery regularities part of his appeal. Now that's going to be much more difficult because the only avenue of appeal he has is whether judgment in default is inappropriate. While courts have vacated default judgments, the arguments usually revolve around whether the action in question is appropriate for the relief granted or when the default happened because the plaintiff didn't take appropiate due diligence to ensure notice. For example, in Ohio there are a good number of properties where the oil and gas rights have been severed from the surface. Some landowners whose property was subject to such severances attempted to get these rights back by filing quiet title actions against the owners of the orphaned OG interests and getting default judgments in their favor. The appeals court ruled that (if I remember correctly) the quiet title actions were inappropriate because the plaintiffs had no colorable claim to the oil and gas and that furthermore, they didn't make a diligent attempt to locate the current owners and provided notice by advertisement. The whole thing was obviously a "gotcha" to get rights they weren't entitled to, and the appeals court saw it for what it was. The Jones case is a fairly straightforward case of defamation and there's no real argument that Jones only didn't comply because his attorneys were unaware of what they were supposed to do.
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