In Freedman v. Weatherford Int’l Ltd., a putative class action alleging securities fraud, the plaintiff moved for reconsideration of the court’s denial of a motion to compel discovery. The plaintiff sought to compare a document that had been produced by defendant Weatherford International during discovery with documents from two internal investigations conducted by defendant, which had not been produced during discovery. Specifically, the plaintiff secured 18 emails from “‘critical custodians at Weatherford’ that were produced (after briefing on the original motion to compel was complete) . . . by third-party KPMG.” KPMG worked with the defendant on its remediation efforts. The defendant never produced these emails during discovery, thereby—according to the plaintiff—demonstrating significant deficiencies in the defendant’s discovery production.
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York acknowledged that discovery on discovery is proper “where a party makes some showing that a producing party’s production has been incomplete . . . in order to test the sufficient of that party’s discovery efforts.” However, these meta-discovery requests must be “closely scrutinized” to avoid unnecessarily prolonging the “costly and time-consuming discovery process.”
The plaintiff argued that KPMG’s production of the 18 emails proved that the defendant’s production was deficient and that providing the plaintiff with the documents of the two internal investigations would lead to the discovery of “additional relevant documents that had not been produced.” Thus, the district court noted that the plaintiff did seek to test the defendant’s discovery efforts. Rather the plaintiff sought to ‘identify the documents missing from [the defendant’s] production.” The district court held that the documents the plaintiff sought would not lead to additional documents not previously produced. The plaintiff admitted that only three of the 18 emails would have been identified had it been able to compare initially produced documents with documents of the two internal investigation. Additionally, the plaintiff never argued that other documents produced by third parties, but not by the defendant, would have been identified by requested document comparison. Moreover, the court stated “the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not require perfection.” Further, “it [was] unsurprising that some relevant documents may have fallen through the cracks,” when the defendant “reviewed million of documents and produced hundreds of thousands.”
In conclusion, the plaintiff’s requested remedy was not best suited to cure the alleged discovery deficiencies. In order to win a motion to compel discovery on discovery, the plaintiff needed to “proffer[] an adequate factual basis for their belief that the current production [was] deficient.” Given that a party is not subjected to sanctions for failing to produce minimal amounts of documents during a massive discovery production when its production was otherwise lawful, the plaintiff in this case should never have filed the motion for reconsideration of its previous motion to compel discovery. Furthermore, the plaintiff should have assessed the usefulness of the relief they sought. In this case, the motion to compel discovery was unnecessary because only three of the 18 emails were relevant and the proposed document comparison would not have yielded any other documents not produced by the defendant.
Aaron Cohen, a Seton Hall University School of Law student (Class of 2015), focuses his studies in the area of family law. He participated in the Seton Hall Center for Social Justice’s Family Law Clinic. After graduation, he will clerk for a judge in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Family Division. Prior to law school, Aaron was a 2011 cum laude graduate of The George Washington University Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, where he earned a B.A. in Psychology.
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March 26, 2015 at 4:07 PM
I agree that the plaintiff should never have filed this motion. There were only 18 emails that the defense didn’t turn over, out of millions they had reviewed. In addition, only 3 of those were actually relevant. In the big scheme of things, it was a waste of time and resources to ask the court to reconsider a motion the court had already denied. It’s understandable that when reviewing millions of documents, you’re going to miss some. This isn’t necessarily done on purpose; it’s just human nature. No one is perfect. The plaintiff’s motion for reconsideration seems like a great overreaction.
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April 9, 2015 at 12:26 AM
The court is going deny the motion as long as the search effort by the producing party is reasonable. I read a case where the court deemed the search strategy reasonable even thought the search did not produce the documents referred in the complaint filed by the producing party!
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