Gonzalez-Caban et al v. JR Seafood Inc et al

Filing 235

MEMORANDUM AND Order re: 230 Appeal of Magistrate Judge Decision. Signed by US Magistrate Judge Silvia Carreno-Coll on 10/23/2015. (NBB)

IN THE UNITED STATES COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO

LUIS GONZÁLEZ-CABÁN, ET
AL.,
Plaintiff,
CIV. NO.: 14-1507(GAG/SCC)
v.
JR SEAFOOD INC., ET AL.,
Defendant.

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER
In an opinion dated September 21, 2015, I denied a motion
to compel that Plaintiffs had filed in this case. Docket No. 212.
In relevant part, I denied Plaintiffs’ request to conduct depositions regarding investigation reports prepared for Defendant
Integrand Assurance by outside claims adjusters, and which
had been disclosed for the first time to Plaintiffs in May and
August of 2015. My reasoning was that at the time Plaintiffs
made the request, the period to conduct factual depositions
had closed, and Plaintiffs had failed to point to any specific

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Page 2

failure by Integrand to comply with its discovery obligations
that would have justified reopening that period.1
Plaintiffs then filed a motion to reconsider my order.
Docket No. 216. This motion argued that I erred when I held
that factual discovery had been closed because, at Docket No.
151, the Court had “extended fact discovery [by] allowing
depositions to be taken in several dates but unwittingly never
set a firm date to end all fact discovery.” Docket No. 216, at 5.
As is the common practice in this district, I denied the motion
to reconsider in a line order without reasoning, but I did so
only after fully considering Plaintiffs’ reasoning. And considering that reasoning, I disagreed with it. At Docket No. 96, the
Court set March 10, 2015, as the date by which depositions of
fact witnesses had to conclude. In June 2015, the parties asked
the Court to approve certain amendments to the discovery
timetable. Docket No. 148. Relevantly, they asked to conduct

1.

That is, the documents about which Plaintiffs wish to conduct
depositions were disclosed by Integrand in response to certain requests
by Plaintiffs. But while Plaintiffs strongly imply that Integrand earlier
had an obligation to disclose these reports, it failed to sufficiently prove
that point: they did not prove that the reports should have been
included in Integrand’s initial disclosures, nor did they point to a
specific instance in which they would have been responsive to a written
discovery request but were not disclosed.

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a deposition of a specific fact witness in July 2015 and reserved
certain days in August for the depositions of any remaining
fact witnesses. Id. at 2. The Court approved the parties’ motion,
Docket No. 151, but in doing so it did not indefinitely extend
the period in which the parties could conduct discovery. On
the contrary, it approved limited extensions of the timetable,
and so at most permitted fact depositions to be conducted
through August 14, 2015. But Plaintiffs’ motion to compel was
not filed until September 10, 2015. Because Plaintiffs’ motion
still failed to point to a discovery failure justifying the reopening of factual deposition discovery, I denied the motion to
reconsider.2
On October 19, 2015, Plaintiffs purported to appeal my
order denying the motion to reconsider to the presiding district
judge.3 Docket No. 230. The putative appeal made much the
2.

At certain points in their filings, Plaintiffs suggest that they were not in
possession of sufficient information to depose the two independent
adjusters before the production of certain documents by Integrand in
August 2015. This is unconvincing. In July 2015, they “subpoenaed
documentation” from one of those adjusters, Alberto Pochet, see Docket
No. 216, at 4, and the report prepared by the other, Rafael Cestero, was
produced to Plaintiffs in May 2015, see Docket No. 197-9.

3.

As Integrand points out, Plaintiffs did not appeal my order denying the
original motion to compel, presumably because they had missed the

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Page 4

same argument that I had rejected in denying the motion for
reconsideration. On October 20, 2015, the presiding judge
converted Plaintiffs’ appeal into a “motion for reconsideration
in the first instance” and referred it to me for disposition,
directing me to state my reasons for decision. I must thus
consider Plaintiffs’ motion as a motion to reconsider my denial
of Plaintiff’s motion to reconsider the denial of their motion to
compel. So construed, I deny it for the same reasons that I
denied the original motion for reconsideration.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this __________________.
S/ SILVIA CARREÑO-COLL
UNITED STATES MAGISTRATE JUDGE

deadline to do so. Instead, they attempted to bootstrap an appeal of the
underlying order onto an appeal of the denial of reconsideration.