IN RE DIDI GLOBAL INC. SECURITIES LITIGATION
- Lewis Kaplan
- 1:21-cv-05807
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 4
In re DiDi Securities Litigation: Judge Kaplan denied underwriters’ request to limit upcoming corporate depositions.
Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C., JP Morgan Securities LLC, and the plaintiffs involved in the planned corporate depositions.
What happened
In IN RE DIDI GLOBAL INC. SECURITIES LITIGATION, Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C. and JP Morgan Securities LLC sought limits on plaintiffs’ planned depositions of the two banks. The banks argued that plaintiffs had agreed to use a narrower set of topics for an earlier deposition of Morgan Stanley.
The banks asked the court to limit the Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan depositions to 25 topics that they said matched the topics previously agreed for Morgan Stanley. They argued that plaintiffs’ notices contained many additional, repetitive, irrelevant, or burdensome topics.
Judge Lewis Kaplan denied the motion. The supplied opinion text does not include an explanation for that ruling or state what limits, if any, will apply to the depositions.
The detailed version
- IN RE DIDI GLOBAL INC. SECURITIES LITIGATION · No. 1:21-cv-05807
- Lewis Kaplan
- July 30, 2025
Background
The supplied text is principally a July 16, 2025 letter from Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C. and JP Morgan Securities LLC. The banks were lead underwriters for DiDi’s June 2021 initial public offering. Plaintiffs planned corporate depositions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(b)(6), which allows a party to question an organization through one or more witnesses designated to testify about specified subjects.
The banks stated that plaintiffs had previously negotiated and narrowed a 56-topic notice for Morgan Stanley to 23 refined topics, and that the Morgan Stanley deposition occurred in October 2024. Plaintiffs later noticed 48 topics for Goldman Sachs and 45 topics for JP Morgan. According to the banks, the notices included some topics previously withdrawn, 20 new topics, and subjects that were duplicative, irrelevant, overly broad, or outside the banks’ knowledge.
Motion
Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan asked for a protective order, meaning an order limiting discovery to prevent undue burden or other harm. They sought to limit the upcoming depositions to 25 topics that they said overlapped with the topics agreed for Morgan Stanley. They also argued that the court could quash the deposition notices entirely. The depositions were scheduled to occur in Hong Kong on July 30 and August 1, 2025.
The supplied text describes the banks’ arguments, including their contention that some proposed topics concerned later trading suspension or delisting discussions, analyst coverage after the offering, regulatory activity they viewed as unrelated to the alleged cybersecurity-review directive, and matters duplicating agreed due-diligence topics. The text does not provide plaintiffs’ response beyond statements quoted or characterized in the banks’ letter.
Ruling
The order states: “Motion denied.” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan therefore denied the protective-order motion. The supplied text does not include the court’s reasoning, does not say whether the court imposed different limits, and does not provide a separate discussion of the deposition topics.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.