I had recently blogged about the discovery dispute in the FLSA class action case involving Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP and how I believed the plaintiffs were overreaching and should not get the information. They wanted data concerning every attorney applicant for a document review assignment that contract attorney-plaintiffs were working on. The case is William Henig v. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP et al., docket number 1:13-cv-01432, and was filed in the Southern District of New York.

The District Court Judge, Ronnie Abrams, had permitted plaintiff William Henig access to more information concerning the person who had interviewed him for his temporary position, but denied him from securing information about other applicants. The law firm then sent a letter to the Court, advising that it had turned over every document relating to the practice of law by Mr. Henig in the month and half he was there and urged that more data, of which there were thousands of pages, was irrelevant.

The Magistrate then determined that the information was relevant and ordered its production. Then, in another loopy turn of events in this meandering saga, Judge Abrams has recently concluded that “the qualifications of other individuals working on the project — and the qualifications of individuals who applied but were not selected to work on the project — have little, if any, probative value, and the burden of producing this information ‘outweighs its likely benefit.’”

This is a solid defeat for the plaintiff(s) and one that I believe was anticipated and, on the law/merits, eminently correct. The law firm had argued that the magistrate judge had exceeded the parameters of an earlier Court Order and they were vindicated in that position. Allowing this production of thousands of documents would have led to infinitely more questions and disputes and would have undeniably been used as a leveraging tool in any settlement discussions or demands that the plaintiffs would have made or be making.

This bodes well for the defendants. I believe all of these cases should be dismissed, because the individuals are in fact exercising the kind of knowledge and discretion that they went to law school for in the first place, even though it may not be in the context they idealized when they wanted to become lawyers.