Sadiant, Inc. v. Penstock Consulting, LLC
- Vargas
- 1:23-cv-07872
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Sadiant v. Penstock, Judge Vargas ordered defense declarations about discovery preservation and set a discovery conference.
Sadiant, Inc., Sadiant Health LLC, Penstock Consulting, LLC, and Penstock’s defense counsel were affected. Penstock and its counsel were required to file declarations, and the parties were required to attend a discovery conference.
What happened
In Sadiant, Inc. and Sadiant Health LLC v. Penstock Consulting, LLC, Penstock had not responded to the plaintiffs’ letter motion seeking an order to compel discovery. The court required Penstock and its lawyer to explain their efforts to preserve and search for records.
The court ordered Penstock’s representative and defense counsel to file declarations by March 7, 2025. The declarations must address litigation holds, preservation efforts, data sources, custodians, search terms and dates, collection of electronically stored information, review methods, and counsel’s supervision of the discovery process.
Judge Jeannette A. Vargas also ordered the parties to attend a discovery conference on March 12, 2025, at 2:30 p.m. The order does not state that the motion to compel was granted or denied.
The detailed version
- Sadiant, Inc. v. Penstock Consulting, LLC · No. 1:23-cv-07872
- Vargas
- Mar. 4, 2025
Background
The plaintiffs filed a letter motion to compel discovery on February 21, 2025. The court stated that Penstock Consulting, LLC had not responded to that motion. The order required Penstock and its defense counsel to provide declarations concerning preservation and discovery efforts.
Required declaration from Penstock
By March 7, 2025, a Penstock representative had to describe:
- When and how Penstock issued a litigation hold, who received it, and its date range and contents. - The steps Penstock took to comply with the hold, including stopping automatic document-destruction programs. - Whether Penstock retained a vendor to collect responsive records and, if so, the vendor’s name. - The people within Penstock who oversaw document collection, including their names and titles. - The custodians whose electronically stored information was preserved. - Non-custodial systems containing electronically stored information that Penstock decided to preserve. - Whether other possible data sources—including social media, messaging applications, thumb drives, and cloud storage—were identified, preserved, and searched. - The custodians whose data was searched and the non-custodial systems that were searched. - The search terms and date ranges used. - When potentially responsive electronically stored information was collected. - The method used to review collected data for responsiveness to the plaintiffs.
Required declaration from defense counsel
Defense counsel also had to explain whether and when counsel issued a litigation hold; what counsel did to oversee compliance; how and when counsel learned about Penstock’s document-retention policies and data-retention systems; whether counsel consulted information-technology personnel; counsel’s role in locating and producing responsive records; and counsel’s involvement in creating or reviewing search methods.
Court’s action
Judge Vargas ordered the declarations and directed the parties to attend a discovery conference on March 12, 2025, at 2:30 p.m. The order does not state that the plaintiffs’ motion to compel was granted or denied.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.