IN RE ENOVIX CORPORATION SECURITIES LITIGATION
- Susan Illston
- 3:23-cv-00071
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 5
Counsel of record per CourtListener. Firm names are approximate and have been consolidated across spelling variants.
In re Enovix Securities Litigation: Judge Illston limited discovery about confidential witnesses and granted three motions to seal.
The plaintiffs and defendants in the securities-fraud action, as well as former employees cited in the complaint. Plaintiffs must make the specified disclosures and submit the Former Employee 2 memorandum for private court review; the court also sealed materials covered by the granted administrative motions.
What happened
In In re Enovix Corporation Securities Litigation, defendants sought broad discovery about former employees whose statements supported plaintiffs’ securities-fraud complaint. Plaintiffs argued that the requests were overly broad and sought protected attorney work product.
The court required plaintiffs to provide communications with former employees cited in the complaint, expedited depositions of employees who later disputed the complaint’s allegations, and limited disclosure of related interview memoranda. It did not require disclosure of investigator instructions, draft memoranda, engagement letters, or similar materials, and required an unredacted memorandum about Former Employee 2 for the court’s private review.
Judge Susan Illston also granted the administrative motions to seal, disposed of the parties’ discovery-dispute filings, and directed the clerk to terminate a duplicate filing as moot.
The detailed version
- IN RE ENOVIX CORPORATION SECURITIES LITIGATION · No. 3:23-cv-00071
- Susan Illston
- July 25, 2025
Background
This securities-fraud case involved a dispute over defendants’ Requests for Production Nos. 3, 4, and 6. Defendants sought documents concerning former-employee witnesses whose statements plaintiffs relied on in their Second Amended Complaint. Defendants reported that five confidential witnesses had submitted sworn declarations disputing allegations that equipment repeatedly failed factory-acceptance testing in China.
Plaintiffs argued that the declarations did not materially contradict the complaint, that declarations from their investigators said otherwise, and that much of the requested information was protected by the attorney work-product doctrine. That doctrine generally protects materials prepared for litigation, although discovery may be ordered when the requesting party shows substantial need and cannot obtain the equivalent without undue hardship. The protection generally remains for attorneys’ mental impressions, conclusions, opinions, and legal theories.
Discovery Ruling
The court found Requests Nos. 4 and 6 overbroad. It concluded that plaintiffs’ proposed production appropriately balanced the need for disclosure against work-product concerns. Plaintiffs must respond by providing:
- All communications between the parties, counsel, or investigators and former employees cited in the complaint;
- Expedited depositions of the former employees who disputed the complaint’s allegations; and
- A limited waiver of work-product protection for investigators’ memoranda, or relevant portions of those memoranda, recording statements by those former employees.
The court did not require plaintiffs to produce documents concerning former employees who were not cited in the operative complaint. It also did not require disclosure of plaintiffs’ instructions to investigators, draft interview memoranda, investigator engagement letters, or similar materials because those materials could reveal attorneys’ mental impressions and litigation processes.
If plaintiffs provided the first category of communications, defendants were expected to disclose relevant communications with Former Employee 2, and plaintiffs could depose Former Employee 2 about whether he had been pressured to change an earlier statement. The court was not persuaded at that stage that the attorney-client privilege for corporate investigations applied to the defendants’ communications with Former Employee 2. The court also cautioned that a later disagreement by a confidential witness does not necessarily establish that the complaint was filed in bad faith or justify sanctions, particularly where translation issues may matter. The opinion noted that the original interview with Former Employee 2 was conducted in Mandarin, while the declaration was written in English, and that the dispute involved the meaning of terms such as “fail” and “conditionally pass.”
Other Dispositions
The court ordered plaintiffs to provide an unredacted copy of the Former Employee 2 memorandum for the court’s in-camera review, meaning private review by the judge, by August 1, 2025. The court stated that it would issue a further order if it later decided defendants should receive that memorandum.
The court granted the administrative motions to seal at Docket Nos. 169, 171, and 173. The order disposed of Docket Nos. 164 and 166, and the clerk could terminate Docket No. 163 as moot because it duplicated Docket No. 164.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.