Judge Says King & Spalding’s Discovery Abuse Claims ‘Are Just Not True’
A federal judge in Atlanta has found that discovery abuse claims made by King & Spalding “are just not true” and ordered the firm or its client to pay 75 percent of its opponent’s fees to litigate the dispute.
The penalty comes to about $87,000, according to the Fulton County Daily Report.
Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. said the dispute could have been avoided if the law firm had simply discussed discovery issues with opposing counsel at Duane Morris before filing a motion to compel.
Instead, King & Spalding had “filled the record with invective,” accusing Duane Morris’ client of “stonewalling discovery, giving plaintiff the runaround, and lying to the court in an effort to delay its discovery obligations,” Thrash said in his Aug. 7 order (PDF posted by the Fulton County Daily Report). But the allegations “are just not true,” he wrote.
The discovery dispute arises out of a patent infringement suit filed by CBT Flint Partners against Cisco IronPort. Besides imposing the $87,000 penalty, Thrash ruled that CBT cannot view potentially privileged documents from Cisco unless it pays $300,000 for a privilege review.
Cisco missed some interim discovery deadlines, according to King & Spalding’s brief, before producing more than 1.4 million documents. Thrash said CBT had made broad discovery requests without making an effort to identify specific categories that were relevant. He chastised an unnamed King & Spalding lawyer for referring to the document production as a “document dump” since CBT had created the search terms that produced the large amount of documents.
CBT lawyers A. Shane Nichols and Anthony Askew of King & Spalding did not comment for the Fulton County Daily Report.
The story notes that Cisco IronPort’s lawyer, L. Norwood “Woody” Jameson of Duane Morris, used to practice law at King & Spalding.
