Likely working round the clock, Meta’s outside attorneys have quickly reviewed and produced most of the responsive documents to the plaintiffs Kadrey book authors from the tranche of 18,000 missed documents that its e-discovery vendor Lighthouse “sequestered” from review.
- Monday: This production totaled 827 documents, including family members. Out of the 827 documents, 356 documents were responsive to Plaintiffs’ discovery requests, including 23 French language documents. The remaining 471 documents were family members linked to the responsive documents.
- Tuesday: This production totaled 487 documents, including family members. Out of the 487 documents, 194 documents were responsive to Plaintiffs’ discovery requests, including 27 French language documents. The remaining 293 documents were non-privileged family members linked to the responsive documents. Meta’s privilege log included 99 documents produced as redacted and 67 documents fully withheld on privilege and/or work product grounds. Meta also identified the 146 non-privileged family members on the log.
- Wednesday: Today, Meta will produce 34 additional documents, 3 of which are French language documents which have 5 family members, 11 of which are slipsheets for documents withheld as privileged, and 15 of which are non-privileged family members to these 11 withheld documents. Meta will also provide an amended privilege log that will add Bates numbers for the 11 withheld documents and associated family members discussed in the preceding sentence, and add 3 documents produced as redacted and 1 document withheld as privileged.
In its prior letter, Meta explained that most of the 18,000 documents were non-responsive or duplicates of documents already produced to the plaintiffs:
- Approximately 3,200 of these documents were previously produced to Plaintiffs. Therefore, they need no further review or processing, as they are already in Plaintiffs’ possession.
- Approximately 3,400 of these documents were previously reviewed for a null set review under the ESI Order and were determined to be non-responsive and therefore required no additional review. Given these are not responsive documents, they need not be produced.
- For the remainder of the documents (approximately 11,000), a large proportion were previously reviewed prior to the sequestration and deemed non-responsive. For the rest, Meta has nearly completed its review and will take the next steps outlined below.
Judge Chhabria issued an order advising the parties to be prepared to discuss this discovery issue at the hearing for the motion to dismiss on February 27, 2025. That suggests to me that Judge Chhabria does not plan on re-opening discovery as the plaintiffs had sought, especially given that the Judge has a set firm dates for summary judgment and the hearing for summary judgment in May. But this doesn’t rule out the possibility that the Judge might take some action against or at least rebuke Meta for the discovery lapse.
Here’s the declaration from the e-discovery vendor Lighthouse: