In Fera v. Village Plaza, Inc, 52 Mich App 532; 218 NW2d 155 (1974), rev'd on other grounds 396 Mich 639 (1976), the plaintiff secured a lease in a shopping plaza under construction for a "book and bottle" store. Id. at 535. The landlord encountered numerous problems before completing the plaza about three years behind schedule. During this protracted delay, one of the defendants discovered an unexecuted copy of a lease and, when the plaintiffs claimed that their lease included the space identified in the unexecuted lease, the defendant demanded that they produce a copy of their executed lease. Id. at 536. The plaintiffs could not do so because they had given their copy of the lease to one of the other defendants for some changes. Whether the plaintiffs knew when they filed suit that the lease included a jury waiver provision is unclear from the opinion. However, the defendants never objected to the jury demand during the ensuing three years of discovery and other pretrial proceedings. Id. at 537 On the first day of trial, the defendants finally produced the lease that the plaintiffs had signed and moved to strike the jury demand, relying on the jury waiver provision in the executed lease. The trial court denied the motion, finding that the defendants had waived a bench trial by failing to object to holding a jury trial at an earlier time. Id. On appeal, the Court concluded that the trial court in Fera had not erred in denying the motion to strike the jury demand. Id. at 537. Rather than framing the issue on appeal as a matter of construing the jury waiver provision in the lease, the Court addressed whether the trial court abused its discretion by denying the defendants' motion to modify the pretrial summary. Id. at 538. In other words, the Court looked at the jury trial question from the perspective of the trial court's discretion to amend the pretrial scheduling order that slated the case for a jury trial. Having defined the issue on appeal, the Court initially examined GCR 1963, 301.3, which provided in part that "the summary of results, i.e., the pretrial scheduling order, controls the subsequent course of the action unless modified at or before trial to prevent manifest injustice." The Court then explained: The modification of the pretrial summary rests within the trial court's sound discretion. Reinhardt v. Bennett, 45 Mich App 18; 205 NW2d 847 (1973). Different from Reinhardt, supra, where a disputed issue had been sufficiently raised in the pleadings to avoid unfair surprise, the nonjury trial provision here presumably caught plaintiffs unaware. While the waiver clause appeared in small print in plaintiffs' unexecuted lease copy, knowledge of that provision is more properly chargeable to defendants who used a variety of standard shopping center leases, some incorporating a waiver of jury trial provision. Even assuming plaintiffs were aware of that provision, defendants had the burden of timely assertion. Defendants' inaction permitted plaintiffs to assume defendants were satisfied with a jury trial. Assertion of the waiver provision could therefore have caused unfair surprise, even assuming some prior knowledge of that provision. The court rule requires a showing of manifest injustice. We find none. Id.