Richards v. Centripetal Networks, Inc.

Background

The case was removed to the Northern District of California in January 2023. The court adopted a case schedule that set July 22, 2024, as the deadline for completing fact discovery. Earlier, the court denied defendants’ motion to stay discovery and later denied Richards’s motion to extend the discovery deadline because he had not shown the diligence required by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16(b).

Richards then filed an administrative motion under Local Rule 7-11 and Rule 16(b) asking to reopen fact discovery for 60 days, with a proposed new deadline of October 6, 2024. He argued that he had understood discovery to be effectively paused while defendants’ stay motion was pending and complained that defendants had delayed his discovery efforts. The court noted that these assertions were not included in counsel’s sworn declaration and that Richards had not served a deposition notice or a timely third-party subpoena during the relevant period.

Defendants’ Opposition

Defendants argued that the proposed extension would be highly prejudicial. In their view, it would shorten the time for rebuttal expert reports from seven weeks to two, reduce the expert-deposition period from one month to one week, and leave only one week for filing motions challenging expert testimony. They also argued that Richards sought extensive and burdensome document discovery, depositions, and third-party subpoenas.

The court further considered Richards’s failure to follow the existing schedule. Richards did not seek an extension promptly after the court denied the stay motion, waited until close to the discovery deadline to request an extension, and had stated that he would not attend an in-person deposition until September because of summer travel. The court also noted that his discovery efforts had progressed little even weeks after the deadline.

Ruling

The court denied the motion to reopen discovery. Rule 16(b) permits changes to a scheduling order when the moving party shows good cause, which generally requires diligence in trying to meet the existing deadline. The court concluded that Richards had not made that showing. It also concluded that any extension that could fit within the existing dispositive-motion, pretrial, and trial schedule would severely prejudice defendants by compressing expert discovery or burdening defendants with a shortened fact-discovery period.

The court did not dismiss the case or decide the underlying claims. It permitted defendants to conduct Richards’s scheduled deposition and permitted Richards to depose witnesses that defendants had agreed to produce voluntarily. All of those depositions had to be completed by September 6, 2024.