Meta’s outside attorneys submitted to Judge Chhabria 63 documents for his in-camera review.
Earlier this week, Judge Chhabria ruled that the Kadrey plaintiffs made a prima facie showing that Meta attorneys may have played a role in possible criminal copyright infringement under Section 506(a)(1) of the Copyright Act. The Judge ordered Meta to submit to him unredacted versions of Meta documents that the plaintiffs identified in its proffer for the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege. (*There’s no indication yet of which Meta attorneys, but one would guess that it involved in-house attorneys. But this is speculation.)
If that were not bad enough for Meta, it also informed Judge Chhabria that it had just learned that a tranche of 18,000 Meta documents had not been reviewed yet, but should have been reviewed in response to the plaintiffs’ discovery requests to see if they were relevant. Meta blamed the lapse on the “e-discovery vendor” it used.
Whoever’s to blame, it’s a safe bet that Judge Chhabria will be none too pleased.
It’s possible that some of the 18,000 Meta documents might also be relevant to (i) the Meta’s “seeding” of torrent files from the controversial LibGen dataset or (ii) Meta’s potential criminal copyright infringement related to the crime-fraud exception issue now before Judge Chhabria.
If this sounds bad for Meta, it is.
That’s why Meta requests the “opportunity to fully brief” the crime-fraud issue.