Commure, Inc. v. Canopy Works, Inc.
- Virginia Demarchi
- 5:24-cv-02592
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 3
In Commure v. Canopy Works, Judge DeMarchi resolved six discovery disputes, ordering production and searches, granting sealing motions, and declining sanctions.
Commure, Inc. and Canopy Works, Inc., the parties required to produce documents, search specified sources, supplement interrogatory responses, confer further, and comply with the court's discovery orders.
What happened
Commure, Inc. v. Canopy Works, Inc. involved six discovery disputes about technical documents, customer and reseller contracts, acquisition records, electronic-file searches, production deadlines, and Strongline Pro development documents. The court also considered motions to seal portions of two discovery letters.
The court ordered both sides to provide source code for inspection by June 17, 2025, and ordered additional document production and searches by specified deadlines. It required searches of specified custodians and sources, allowed Commure to seek cost shifting for unnecessary duplicate searches, and directed the parties to confer further about some materials. The court did not require Commure to provide another response to one interrogatory.
Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi granted the sealing motions, declined to sanction either party for missing the substantial-completion deadline, and ordered the parties to confer further about the Strongline Pro dispute and resubmit it if necessary.
The detailed version
- Commure, Inc. v. Canopy Works, Inc. · No. 5:24-cv-02592
- Virginia Demarchi
- June 5, 2025
Background
The parties filed six discovery-dispute letters concerning their ongoing case and related counterclaims. The court addressed all six disputes at a June 3, 2025 hearing. Canopy also moved to seal portions of two discovery letters concerning Commure's merger-and-acquisition documents and customer contracts. The court applied the good-cause standard for sealing discovery materials and found good cause to grant the sealing motions.
Discovery rulings
1. Canopy's technical documents (Dkt. No. 268). Commure and Canopy must make the source code for the products at issue available for inspection by the other party no later than June 17, 2025. Canopy must also produce responsive technical documentation sufficient to show the design, development, and implementation of its alleged trade secrets, including documents from shared repositories such as Notion and Google Drive, by June 30, 2025.
2. Customer and reseller contracts (Dkt. No. 276). Commure must produce all customer and reseller contracts for Strongline and Strongline Pro to Canopy. Canopy must produce all customer and reseller contracts for Canopy Protect to Commure, in each case by June 17, 2025. Commure must supplement its responses to Canopy's Interrogatories Nos. 12 and 18 by June 30, 2025.
- Commure's acquisitions of Strongline LLC and Athelas (Dkt. No. 270). Commure must produce communications and deal-room documents responsive to Canopy's requests for production Nos. 3, 4, 7, 68, and 76 concerning diligence for those acquisitions by June 30,
- Commure must supplement its response to Canopy's Interrogatory No. 19 by July 7,
- It need not provide a further response to Interrogatory No. 5.
4. Electronic-file custodians (Dkt. No. 274). Canopy must search the files of the eight custodians identified in its discovery-dispute letter. Commure must search the files of the ten custodians identified in the specified portion of its letter and must also search specified Strongline LLC email accounts, as well as the files of Don Miller, Patrick O'Neill, Chris Kuhns, and approximately five engineers whom Commure contends independently developed the relevant work. If Commure shows that these additional sources produce documents effectively duplicative of documents from sources it had already agreed to search, it may ask the court to shift unnecessary costs to Canopy. The parties must confer further about relevant materials in Strongline LLC shared repositories that are not available from more accessible sources. The court was not persuaded that Canopy adequately justified requiring searches of the other individual custodians listed in the dispute letter.
5. Substantial-completion deadline (Dkt. No. 272). The court found that neither party appeared to have substantially completed its document production by April 30, 2025. It declined to sanction either party and instead encouraged both sides to work diligently and cooperatively to complete their productions.
6. Strongline Pro development documentation (Dkt. No. 271). The court found that the parties had not conferred in good faith as required by the court's standing order and had not presented the dispute in a form that could be resolved. It ordered them to confer further and, if necessary, submit the dispute for resolution.
Disposition
The court granted the sealing motions; issued the discovery-production, supplementation, and search orders described above; declined to sanction either party; and ordered further efforts to resolve the Strongline Pro dispute. This was a discovery and case-management order, not a decision on the underlying claims or counterclaims.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.