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Mealey's Discovery

  • October 07, 2025

    OptumRx Argues Deposition In Opioid MDL Should Be Put On Hold To Avoid Duplication

    CLEVELAND — A pharmacy benefits manager (PBM) in the nationwide opioid multidistrict litigation on Oct. 6 objected to a ruling by the special master overseeing the MDL denying its motion for a protective order regarding a deposition that the PBM says will give counsel for the plaintiffs “two bites at the apple.”

  • October 07, 2025

    6th Circuit Grants Mandamus Petition in FirstEnergy Bribery Securities Case

    CINCINNATI — The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals granted FirstEnergy Corp.’s petition for mandamus related to an order to compel investigatory documents from law firms retained by FirstEnergy, which was suspected of wrongdoing in a securities bribery scandal; the panel found the documents are protected by the attorney-client privilege and the work product doctrine.

  • October 07, 2025

    Law Firm In Thalidomide Cases Says Sanctions Not Warranted, No Misconduct

    PHILADELPHIA — A law firm and its managing partner, who represented plaintiffs who claimed that they suffered birth defects as a result of their mothers being given the drug thalidomide to treat morning sickness during their pregnancies, tell a Pennsylvania federal judge in response to a show cause order that sanctions are not warranted for the firm’s alleged misconduct during the litigation, which began in 2011.

  • October 07, 2025

    Pa. High Court: Agency Regulation Didn’t Create An Evidentiary Privilege

    HARRISBURG, Pa. — In an Oct. 6 decision it said involved a matter of first impression, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court disagreed with the reason a state court cited for overruling Pennsylvania Parole Board discovery objections in a parole dispute but upheld the result on the grounds that the board lacks authority “to create an evidentiary privilege.”

  • October 07, 2025

    Supreme Court Won’t Hear Device Maker’s Patent Discovery Arguments

    WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 6 rejected a medical product company’s petition for a writ of certiorari in which it told the court that a North Carolina federal court violated its due process rights by changing both the time to trial and the time for discovery in a patent infringement case for which the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has already ordered a new trial.

  • October 07, 2025

    Anthropic Pushes Back On Ruling Delaying AI Copyright Damages

    SAN JOSE, Calif. — Anthropic PBC told a federal judge in California that music publishers already have all the information they need to calculate damages and neither the novelty nor the complexity of an artificial intelligence copyright case requires delaying the disclosure.

  • October 07, 2025

    Ala. High Court Tells Lower Court To Set Aside Judgment In Bar Fight Discovery Row

    MONTGOMERY, Ala. —  The Alabama Supreme Court granted a petition for writ of mandamus and issued a writ directing a lower court to set aside its order denying a summary judgment motion filed by a defendant in a suit by two men against the defendant and other parties over injuries sustained in an altercation outside a nightclub, finding that the plaintiffs failed to use due diligence in their discovery efforts to learn the identity of the defendant and the claims against him are time-barred pursuant to the relevant statute of limitations.

  • October 06, 2025

    U.S. Supreme Court Won’t Decide Conflict On FERPA Interpretations

    WASHINGTON, D.C. — A school district’s petition for a writ of certiorari that asking U.S. Supreme Court justices to clear up conflicting court interpretations regarding enforcement of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) alongside state public records acts (PRAs) was denied by the high court on Oct. 6.

  • October 06, 2025

    Amici Urge U.S. High Court To Bar State Court Control Over Foreign Assets

    WASHINGTON, D.C.  — Insurance and business interests told the U.S. Supreme Court that jurisdiction ends at a state’s borders and urged the court to reject a South Carolina justice’s appointment of a receiver over the assets of a solvent Canadian company as a discovery sanction in an asbestos case.

  • October 06, 2025

    Illinois Federal Judge Issues Discovery Motions Order In CERCLA Oil Refinery Case

    EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. — An Illinois federal judge issued rulings on cross-motions to compel discovery for documents related to litigation in a similar case and insurance filings, among other things in a refinery owner’s case against several oil companies alleging violations of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act over environmental contamination.

  • October 03, 2025

    AI Copyright Plaintiffs Blocked From Expanded Discovery For 3rd Time

    OAKLAND, Calif. — A federal magistrate judge in California on Oct. 2 declined to expand the datasets subject to discovery in an artificial intelligence copyright suit, relying on her previous conclusion that discovery should be limited to The Pile dataset, which contains the copyrighted works and was used to train Nvidia Corp.’s NeMo Megatron large language model.

  • September 30, 2025

    Kentucky Supreme Court Reverses Murder Conviction Due To Discovery Error

    FRANKFORT, Ky. — The prosecution’s failure to disclose during discovery the existence of recordings of incriminating jailhouse phone calls made by the defendant violated state criminal procedures, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled, leading it to reluctantly reverse the man’s  murder conviction and remand for a new trial.

  • September 30, 2025

    Discovery Stayed Pending Resolution Of Dismissal Motions In Reinsurance Dispute

    WILMINGTON, Del. — A Delaware state vice chancellor granted a stay of discovery pending the resolution of motions to dismiss in three related cases concerning a disputed captive reinsurance pool, holding that the filing defendants demonstrated good cause under the court’s rules and concluding that, with dispositive motions pending and no special circumstances justifying immediate discovery, a pause was necessary to prevent undue burden and expense.

  • September 26, 2025

    3rd Circuit Affirms Denial Of Discovery Motions In Suit Over Informant’s Death

    PHILADELPHIA — In a ruling upholding a trial court’s grant of summary judgment that ended a 13-year-old lawsuit over the murder of a confidential informant (CI) in an illegal gambling investigation, a Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel also affirmed the lower court’s denial of discovery motions by the decedent’s estate.

  • September 26, 2025

    Judge Affirms Limits On Dataset Discovery In AI Copyright Fight

    SAN FRANCISCO — A California federal judge on Sept. 25 denied a motion for relief from a magistrate judge’s order limiting discovery into the datasets used to train artificial intelligence, saying courts regularly impose such limits when the discovery exceeds the allegations in a complaint.

  • September 26, 2025

    Authors Challenge Limits On Shadow Library Discovery In Nvidia AI Copyright Case

    SAN FRANCISCO — Responding to a motion by authors arguing that a magistrate judge improperly limited discovery to a single dataset in an artificial intelligence copyright suit, Nvidia Corp. told the court that the order merely limits the plaintiffs to their own allegations and that there was no error sufficient to overturn the nondispositive order.

  • September 24, 2025

    Magistrate Judge Won’t Order Immediate Damages Update In AI Music Copyright Suit

    SAN JOSE, Calif. — A federal magistrate judge in California declined to order music publishers to immediately supplement damages computations under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 in an artificial intelligence copyright suit, noting the novelty and complexity of the issue.

  • September 24, 2025

    Government Seeks Rehearing On Discovery Ruling In Federal Worker RIF Appeal

    SAN FRANCISCO — The federal government on Sept. 23 filed a petition for rehearing or rehearing en banc concerning the discovery portion of a split Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals order in which the appellate panel majority, in a ruling addressing two appeals in a case challenging the large scale reduction-in-force (RIF) of federal workers, denied the government’s petition for a writ of mandamus seeking to require the trial court to vacate a discovery order and vacated a preliminary injunction and remanded for further consideration.

  • September 24, 2025

    3rd Circuit Denies Rehearing In Securities Suit Against Reinsurer

    PHILADELPHIA — A Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel denied the petition of a reinsurer and three former executives to rehear its decision to vacate a lower court’s discovery and summary judgment rulings in investors’ suit against the reinsurer and executives over allegations that they violated federal securities laws by omitting historical loss ratios from loss reserves disclosures; the panel had found that the omitted historical loss ratios were material and that discovery had not been completed.

  • September 23, 2025

    Magistrate Judge Won’t Order Production Of NYT’s AI Chat Usage

    NEW YORK — A federal magistrate judge in New York denied a motion to compel by OpenAI entities and Microsoft seeking user logs from The New York Times’ internal ChatGPT-based tool, ruling that the logs are irrelevant to the fair use defense and would cost nearly $1 million and three months to review and produce.

  • September 22, 2025

    Judge Orders Discovery Under ‘Crime-Fraud Exception’ In $102M Shipping Award Row

    NEW YORK — A New York federal judge on Sept. 19 granted in part a motion to compel two Liberian shipping companies to produce records that relate to whether they committed a fraud upon a JAMS arbitrator who later awarded them more than $102 million in a shipping contract dispute, rejecting privilege arguments raised by the companies’ former law firm two days after the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals denied the firm’s emergency motion to stay discovery.

  • September 19, 2025

    New Hampshire High Court: No Crime-Fraud Exception In Doctors’ Discovery Row

    CONCORD, N.H. — A New Hampshire Supreme Court panel issued a mixed ruling in a discovery dispute between three anesthesiologists and their former employer, finding that the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege did not apply and thus did not serve to compel discovery of certain communications between the physicians and their counsel.

  • September 16, 2025

    J&J Says Business Records Stipulation Doesn’t Apply Globally To Asbestos Cases

    BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — A man’s attempt to force a defendant to verify the propriety of business records is built on the “fiction” that stipulations in other cases apply to his asbestos-talc action despite the lack of any agreement or need for that many documents, Johnson & Johnson tells a Connecticut judge in a Sept. 15 response opposing a motion to enforce the agreements.

  • September 12, 2025

    Sanctions Ordered In Text Message Employment Dispute As To ‘Incredible’ Testimony

    CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. — A New York federal magistrate judge granted in part a motion for sanctions regarding failure to preserve electronically stored information in a suit filed by a woman against her former supervisor, former employer and its parent company alleging retaliation pursuant to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, finding “highly incredible” the testimony of two individuals who deleted text messages and purportedly failed to “take reasonable steps to preserve evidence.”

  • September 12, 2025

    Google AI Copyright Case Proceeds As Court Preps For AI Metadata Discovery Issue

    SAN JOSE, Calif. — A federal judge on Sept. 11 dismissed with prejudice claims involving certain Google LLC artificial intelligence models and vicarious liability claims against parent company Alphabet Inc. but otherwise denied a motion to dismiss.  Earlier a magistrate judge said she would not take up artificial intelligence copyright plaintiffs’ request to appoint a special master but would hold a hearing on a motion to compel after plaintiffs complained that discovery lacked metadata critical to identifying copyrighted material.  Google LLC filed its response to the motion on Sept. 10, saying it had “gone above and beyond” what was required of it.