Doe v. Regents of the University of California

Filing 72

ORDER by Judge Kandis A. Westmore regarding 67 8/15/24 Discovery Letter Brief. (kawlc1, COURT STAFF) (Filed on 8/30/2024)

1
2
3
4

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

5

NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA

6
7

JANE DOE,

Case No. 23-cv-00598-WHO (KAW)
Plaintiff,

8
v.

9

ORDER RE 8/15/2024 DISCOVERY
LETTER
Re: Dkt. No. 67

10

REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA,

11

[Discovery Letter No. 1]

United States District Court
Northern District of California

Defendant.
12
On August 15, 2024, the parties filed a joint discovery letter concerning the sufficiency of

13
14

Defendant’s ESI search protocol. (Joint Letter, Dkt. No. 67.) In sum, after six months of

15

negotiations, the parties agreed to a final set of search terms, which identified 80,000 documents

16

out of several million existing documents. Id. at 1. This compromised set of search terms resulted

17

in an 11% increase in documents than Defendant’s original proposal, such that it added

18

approximately 8,000 documents for review. Id.

19

Based on the parties’ agreement, Plaintiff believed that Regents would conduct a “linear”1

20

review of the documents identified by these agreed-to terms and produce the responsive materials.

21

(Joint Letter at 1.) Instead, on June 11, 2024, Defendant disclosed that it intended to apply “other

22

filtering methods” to exclude documents, including using “exclusion” terms, before conducting a

23

linear review. Id. Plaintiff contends that she did not agree to this and that Defendant’s unilateral

24

implementation of these other filtering methods violates the parties’ stipulated ESI Protocol,

25

which provides that the “Parties shall cooperate in the development of appropriate search

26

methodology and criteria . . . before any search methodology is applied.” (Joint Letter at 3 (citing

27
28

1

A linear review is a traditional, manual review of documents by humans to determine relevance.

United States District Court
Northern District of California

1

ESI Protocol, Dkt. No. 44 at 6).)

2

The Court agrees. The parties spent several months negotiating the search terms to be

3

applied to Defendant’s ESI, which resulted in a universe of approximately 80,000 documents,

4

which then needed to be reviewed for relevancy and responsiveness. (See Joint Letter at 4.)

5

Defendant’s argument that it can conduct that first-level review, in part, by unilaterally

6

implementing additional search terms to exclude potentially responsive documents to reduce the

7

number of documents requiring manual review, is both unavailing and a clear violation of the ESI

8

Protocol. (See Joint Letter at 4-5.)

9

Accordingly, Defendant is ordered to run the ESI search with the original agreed-to

10

terms— and without any of the described filtering methodology— and produce all non-privileged,

11

responsive documents within 14 days of this order.

12

This resolves Dkt. No. 67.

13

IT IS SO ORDERED.

14

Dated: August 30, 2024
__________________________________
KANDIS A. WESTMORE
United States Magistrate Judge

15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
2