Seroquel Products Liability Litigation
Lack of a meaningful meet and confer and purposeful sluggishness leads to failure to comply with numerous discovery obligations and potential sanctions in In re Seroquel Products Liability Litigation (2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 61287 (M.D. Fl. Aug. 21, 2007).
Magistrate Judge David Baker in this multidistrict litigation (MDL) products liability proceeding has sanctioned defendant AstraZeneca (“AZ”) for its failure to timely and systematically produce e-discovery.
In January 2007, the court had entered a comprehensive Case Management Order regarding the timing and method of discovery, including detailed requirements for e-discovery. The court set forth the party’s document collection and production obligations and held that each party shall bear its own costs for the production of accessible data. The order allowed plaintiffs to conduct information interviews of AZ employed IT persons about approximately 14 categories of databases and the methods by which information could be produced or extracted. Additionally, the court commented that the defendant’s failure to “investigate and understand its own records and documents and to prepare them for production has not met expectations of the Court as discussed in the September 2006 Conference.”
In April 2007, the plaintiff’s motion to compel was denied to allow parties to confer “in good faith” but an evidentiary hearing on the motion was scheduled for a later date. That hearing was later canceled when AZ asserted that it would correct the deficiencies. Ultimately, plaintiff’s counsel did not believe the deficiencies were addressed and filed the motion for sanctions which was granted in part.
The sanctions were granted based on a number of AZ’s discovery failures. Despite requests by plaintiffs’ expert to meet with an equivalent IT counterpart to discuss various technical problems with production of over ten million pages and an explicit order to allow plaintiffs to interview AZ’s IT employees, no one was provided and no discussion took place. AZ’s unilateral decision to conduct key word searches on a number of its databases to locate relevant documents without coming to an agreement with the plaintiffs about the words to be used was a concern. The court found the key word search was “plainly inadequate,” attachments to emails were not provided, relevant emails were omitted, AZ’s de-duplication method “remains mysterious,” production was tardy, AZ’s efforts in preventing and solving its technical problems were “woefully deficient,” and there was no quality control. The documents were “unsearchable, and unusable.”
Ultimately, the court reached the conclusion that AZ was “purposely sluggish” in its production to plaintiffs. The court noted that the sluggishness had benefited AZ and prejudiced the plaintiffs by limiting the time available to for review and follow up investigation. Therefore, prejudice was presumed. The court had little sympathy for AZ’s attempt to blame its vendor by responding with citations to appellate decisions holding that continued reliance on an ineffective vendor is itself subject to sanctions.
