Local 3621, EMS Officers Union, DC-37, AFSCME, AFL-CIO v. City of New York

Nature of the Provided Material

The supplied text does not state a judicial ruling. It contains a letter from Bryan Carr Olert, an Assistant Corporation Counsel, requesting relief from a prior discovery order, along with Corina Leske’s declaration about the location and volume of EMS performance evaluations. The text does not say whether the court granted, denied, or otherwise resolved that request.

Discovery Request and Defendants’ Position

The disputed request sought annual performance evaluations for EMS employees who held the ranks of Lieutenant, Captain, Deputy Chief, or Division Commander from 1996 to the present. The earlier order limited the required production to information going back to 2004. The request also sought identification of employees who did not receive evaluations, the years involved, and the reasons evaluations were not completed.

The defendants argued that further production would be unduly burdensome and disproportionate to the needs of the case under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26. They said they had already produced approximately 1,000 evaluations from promotion files, electronic evaluations and evaluation scores for later years, and data from the PerfEval legacy database. According to the materials, PerfEval contained approximately 28,000 evaluation scores, while the estimated number of annual EMS evaluations for the relevant period was approximately 57,000.

Paper and Electronic Records

The declaration states that EMS evaluations from 2004 through 2019 were maintained only in paper form after a reasonable search. The records were primarily in personnel files, with some files at EMS station houses and some older files in off-site storage. The defendants estimated that locating, digitizing, and indexing all paper evaluations would require approximately 14,250 hours, or 2,035 workdays, for one full-time employee. For evaluations involving Lieutenant and higher ranks, they estimated approximately 2,000 hours, or 285 workdays, without including quality-assurance review.

The defendants also said that searching emails for additional electronic evaluations would require searching hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of emails maintained by approximately 8,500 custodians. They further stated that email searches could not reach messages from before 2012 because the City did not begin using Microsoft 365 until then.

Relevance and Document-Creation Argument

The defendants argued that evaluations not submitted with applications for promotions to Captain or higher were not relevant to the plaintiffs’ claims. They contended that the plaintiffs could test their theory about evaluation scores using the evaluations already produced or being produced.

The defendants also argued that Rule 34 could not be used to require them to create a document listing every employee who did not receive an evaluation, the relevant year, and the reason. They stated that, when an employee did not receive an evaluation, EMS generated a form marking the employee as “unratable,” rather than a separate document containing the requested compilation.

Disposition

No disposition appears in the supplied text. The materials show that defendants requested relief from the prior discovery order, but they do not show how Judge Liman or any other judge ruled on that request. The document also references Magistrate Judge Jennifer E. Willis, creating uncertainty about whether the supplied material is the complete court opinion or instead includes filings submitted in connection with the discovery dispute.