Leard v. Yrc Inc, Case:No 8:09CV408
| Decision Date | 10 January 2011 |
| Docket Number | Case:No 8:09CV408 |
| Parties | KEITH LEARD, Plaintiff, v. YRC, INC., a Kansas corporation authorized to do business in Nebraska, Defendant. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Nebraska |
This matter is before the court on plaintiffs "Amended Motion to Compel" (#53), motion to extend the deposition deadline (#68), and motion to extend the dispositive motion deadline (#70). The court assumes, without deciding, that the plaintiff complied with NECivR 7.0.1(f).
Plaintiff s claims arise under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Nebraska Fair Employment Practices Act. The Amended Motion to Compel pertains to plaintiff's Request No. 17 for "employee files and any and all documents in [defendant's] possession pertaining to medical restrictions, injuries, [and] medical information of any kind" for seven individuals who are not parties to this lawsuit. Defendant objected to the request, on grounds of overbreadth, undue burden, relevancy, and because the request sought private and confidential health and medical information of non-parties.
This court considered a similar issue in Kaufman v. Western Sugar Co-op., Inc., 2007 WL 2509480 at *3, Case No. 7:06cv5017 (D. Neb. Aug 29, 2007), and will employ the same analysis in this case.
The scope of discovery in federal civil actions is set out in Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Under Rule 26(b)(1), the parties to a lawsuit may obtain discovery regarding "any nonprivileged matter that is relevant6 to any party's claim or defense[.]" Relevant information need not be admissible at trial "if the discovery appears reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence." Id. Relevancy is broadly construed, and a request for discovery should be considered relevant if there is Moses v. Halstead, 236 F.R.D. 667, 671 (D. Kan. 2006) (footnotes omitted).
All discovery is subject to the limitations imposed by Rule 26(b)(2), and the court must limit discovery if it determines that:
(i) the discovery sought is unreasonably cumulative or duplicative, or can be obtained from some other source that is more convenient, less burdensome, or less expensive;
(ii) the party seeking discovery has had ample opportunity to obtain the information by discovery in the action; or
(iii) the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit, considering the needs of the case, the amount in controversy, the parties' resources, the importance of the issues at stake in the action, and the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues.
Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C). Rule 26(c) further contemplates the issuance ofprotective orders "to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense" in certain respects.
When the discovery sought appears relevant on its face, the party resisting discovery has the burden to establish that the discovery is not relevant, or is "of such marginal relevance that the potential harmoccasioned by the discovery would outweigh the ordinary presumption in favor of broad disclosure." Moses v. Halstead, 236 F.R.D. at 671. If the relevancy of the discovery request is not readily apparent, the party seeking the discovery has the burden to show the relevancy of the request. Id.
In this case, the relevancy of the non-parties' confidential personnel and medical records is not readily apparent. Neither the originalmotion to compel (#50) nor the pending Amended Motion to Compel explained how the information sought is relevant to any issue in this litigation. In the opening brief (#54), the plaintiffmaintained only that the non-parties' medical records should be produced pursuant to a qualified protective order. The plaintiff only offered an explanation, by way of filing a reply brief and evidence index (#65 & #66), when forced to refute the defendant's highly persuasive arguments (see #61 & #62) that these records are not relevant to any issue in this lawsuit.
Even assuming the non-parties' confidential records were somehow relevant to this litigation, the plaintiffhas not shown that the value of the information sought outweighs the privacy interests of the affected non-parties. This court will not compel the production of non-parties' personnel or medical records, even subject to a "qualified protective order" under HIPAA, unless the requesting party makes a "compelling showing ofrelevance." See Onwuka v. Federal Express Corp., 178 F.R.D. 508, 517 (D. Minn. 1997). The Amended Motion to Compel is denied.
The deposition...
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