Woodward v. Emulex Corp.

• Decision Date: 18 April 2013
• Docket Number: No. 12–1612.,12–1612.
• Citation: Woodward v. Emulex Corp., 714 F.3d 632 (1st Cir. 2013)
• Parties: Frank WOODWARD, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. EMULEX CORPORATION and Jeff Hoogenboom, Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

714 F.3d 632

Frank WOODWARD, Plaintiff, Appellant,

v.EMULEX CORPORATION and Jeff Hoogenboom, Defendants, Appellees.

No. 12–1612.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

April 18, 2013.

Paul H. Merry, with whom Law Offices of Paul H. Merry was on brief, for appellant.

T.Dos Urbanski, with whom Michael J. Mazurczak, Andre Sansoucy and Melick & Porter, LLP were on brief, for appellees.

Before HOWARD, STAHL and LIPEZ, Circuit Judges.

HOWARD, Circuit Judge.

PlaintiffFrank Woodward appeals a grant of summary judgment by the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts in his age discrimination suit against Emulex Corporation.Woodward also appeals two discovery orders.We affirm in all respects.

I.Background

Emulex, a technology company based in California, manufactures components for large-scale computer networks and data storage systems.Woodward joined Emulex in 2000 as a sales account manager.Prior to joining Emulex, Woodward worked in sales for another technology company where he developed a close relationship with EMC Corporation, a large computer storage company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.In his new position with Emulex, Woodward continued that relationship with marked success.The company provided him with an office in Newton, Massachusetts, where he was the sole employee and could easily travel to his main client EMC.His results speak for themselves: over $800 million in revenue and over fifty “design wins,” meaning that EMC incorporated Emulex parts into its own products, ensuring a steady stream of sales for the life cycle of those products.Woodward and his team consistently outperformed their goals and Woodward received praise and accolades for his success.The EMC team grew to five employees, two of whom Woodward managed as a senior director.During this time, EMC was always either the third or fourth largest Emulex client based on sales revenue.

Beginning in 2007, however, revenues from EMC began to decline.Woodward interprets this decline as a function of two factors.First, the general downturn in the economy affected Emulex, as demonstrated by similarly sluggish numbers for other sales teams.Second, Woodward alleges that Emulex undermined the EMC team's ability to take advantage of growth opportunities.Though Woodward requestedmore personnel for his team, Emulex refused to increase the EMC sales force.Emulex also canceled certain products after the EMC team had already obtained sales agreements for them.Woodward also faults Emulex for failing to address inefficient and counterproductive actions by other Emulex employees.Part of Woodward's success was negotiating price agreements with terms favorable to Emulex.Other Emulex employees, seeing an opportunity to increase their own sales, offered EMC better rates.According to Woodward, these sales teams not only poached from his work, but also cannibalized Emulex's overall profits.His complaints about this practice went unanswered.Moreover, Emulex occasionally failed to deliver products on time to EMC, and it did not heed Woodward's suggestions about improving its delivery system.

In early 2009, Emulex let go two EMC team members.Shortly thereafter, in March 2009, Woodward was notified that he too would lose his job.The two remaining EMC team members jointly assumed Woodward's responsibilities when he left in July 2009.

While Emulex does not dispute these allegations, it contends that its decisions were the result of diminishing EMC-related profits, not the cause of them.According to Emulex, the computer storage industry was undergoing a transition from stand-alone systems (storage systems) to integrated systems (server systems).Consequently, Emulex, which produced Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) for both systems, began focusing on blade HBAs—removable hardware compatible with server systems—as opposed to storage-system HBAs.EMC does not make or sell server systems.Thus, Emulex claims, the EMC business could no longer justify a five-person sales team, as evidenced by the permanent reduction of the EMC team to two employees.

Woodward, however, discounted Emulex's reasoning and suspected that age discrimination played a role in his termination.In January 2009—two months before Woodward's notice of termination—Jeffrey Hoogenboom, Emulex's new vice president of sales, commented that Woodward needed to “re-energize” the EMC team.Woodward, who was fifty-five at the time, considered this a disparaging remark about the ages of the EMC team members, which ranged from forty-nine to fifty-nine.After his termination, he filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination(MCAD), alleging age discrimination.MCAD dismissed Woodward's complaint for a lack of probable cause, and he subsequently brought suit in state court, claiming, among other things, age discrimination under Massachusetts law.Emulex removed the case to the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts based on diversity jurisdiction, and then moved for summary judgment on all counts.The district court granted this motion, and Woodward appealed.

II.Discussion

A.Discovery

Woodward first challenges two discovery-related orders: 1) the district court's partial denial of his third motion to compel; and 2) the district court's decision to quash deposition notices for three Emulex employees, including Hoogenboom.We review orders pertaining to discovery for abuse of discretion.SeeAwuah v. Coverall N. Am., Inc.,585 F.3d 479, 481(1st Cir.2009).

1.Motion to Compel

From the outset of this case, discovery inched forward, with both sides contending over its scope and refusing to accede to the other's requests.During this acrimonious process, Emulex resisted Woodward's attempts to obtain considerable information about all employees at his management level or higher.Woodward eventually limited his request to information about the age, date of hire, positions and duties, date of termination, and grounds for termination of all employees holding the titles of director, senior director, vice president, senior vice president or executive vice president between 2008 and 2010.Woodward requested this information in an interrogatory and in a document request filed in September 2011.He included a list of twenty-one known employees falling within these categories but did not limit his request to the employees on this list.Emulex did not provide the information, and Woodward moved to compel discovery.The district court granted the motion to compel an answer to the interrogatory, but only with respect to the twenty-one named employees.It did not order Emulex to comply with the document request.Emulex complied with the order.Woodward appeals the district court's decision to limit discovery to the interrogatory request, and to only the twenty-one named employees.

“[T]he standard of review in discovery matters is not appellant-friendly.”Dennis v. Osram Sylvania, Inc.,549 F.3d 851, 860(1st Cir.2008)(citations omitted)(internal quotation marks omitted).“[T]he trier must be accorded considerable latitude in gauging the extent of a party's compliance with [discovery] precepts.”Mack v. Great Atl. & Pac. Tea Co.,871 F.2d 179, 187(1st Cir.1989).Woodward claims that the district court's partial denial of his motion to compel constituted an abuse of discretion.We disagree.First, the denial of Woodward's document request was within the district court's discretion.Woodward sought the same information through the twin vehicles of an interrogatory and a document request.Thus, the district court did not deny discovery of new information, but simply did not compel the production of an arguably duplicative request for documents.

The district court was also within its power in limiting Woodward's interrogatory to the twenty-one named employees.The purpose of this interrogatory was to compare Woodward's treatment to that of similarly situated employees.A sine qua non of such a comparison is a congruence of work responsibilities.SeeDartmouth Review v. Dartmouth Coll.,889 F.2d 13, 19(1st Cir.1989)(employees must be similarly situated “in all relevant aspects” to establish disparate treatment in an employment discrimination suit (internal quotation marks omitted)), overruled on other grounds byEducadores Puertorriqueños en Acción v. Hernández,367 F.3d 61(1st Cir.2004).However, Woodward's request for information about all directors and vice presidents went far beyond Emulex's sales force and likely would have covered employees who had little or no comparative value for Woodward's suit.

By contrast, every employee on Woodward's list was a member of Emulex's sales force, working in the same area as Woodward.Moreover, when Woodward filed this motion to compel, discovery had proceeded, albeit haltingly, for eleven months, giving Woodward time to identify the relevant employees for comparison.The district court could have determined that, at this late stage in discovery, the twenty-one named employees represented Woodward's best chance of finding some differential treatment between younger and older employees.Given the alternative—a fishing expedition into possibly barren waters—the district court did not abuse its discretion by limiting discovery to those individuals.SeeFed.R.Civ.P. 26(b)(2)(C)(iii)(requiring courts to limit discovery when “the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit”).

2.Motion to Quash

Woodward also appeals the district court's order quashing deposition notices for three Emulex employees: Hoogenboom, Jeff Benck, and Susan Bowman.At the discovery deadline, October 17, 2011, Woodward served the three employees with notices of depositions to occur in a three-day period two weeks hence.The parties struggled to find a time for these depositions that was convenient to both sides.Much of the difficulty arose from Woodward's insistence that he attend the...