In re The Estee Lauder Co., Inc. Securities Litigation
- Subramanian
- 1:23-cv-10669
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In re Estee Lauder Securities Litigation, Judge Subramanian ordered defendants to respond to plaintiffs’ discovery letter by August 5, 2025, without deciding the dispute.
The lead plaintiffs and defendants in the securities litigation are affected. Defendants were ordered to respond to the discovery letter by 5:00 p.m. on August 5, 2025; the provided text does not show a final ruling on the requested document production.
What happened
In re The Estee Lauder Co., Inc. Securities Litigation concerns the lead plaintiffs’ request for documents from before and after the alleged class period. They asked the court to require searches covering dates beginning January 1, 2020, and extending into 2024 or, for certain requests, February 2025.
The lead plaintiffs said the earlier and later documents could help show whether statements about the company’s sales were misleading, whether defendants knew that an illicit gray-market practice called daigou affected sales, and whether that practice caused later losses. They said the defendants had produced no substantive documents and that the parties had reached an impasse over the date range for discovery.
The order shown requires defendants to respond by 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 5, 2025. Judge Arun Subramanian did not decide in this text whether defendants must produce the requested documents or what discovery period applies.
The detailed version
- In re The Estee Lauder Co., Inc. Securities Litigation · No. 1:23-cv-10669
- Subramanian
- Aug. 1, 2025
Background
Lead Plaintiffs submitted a letter motion about a discovery dispute under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 and the court’s local discovery procedures. The dispute concerned the relevant time periods for documents responsive to Lead Plaintiffs’ first requests for production.
The class period identified in the letter ran from February 3, 2022, through October 31, 2023. Lead Plaintiffs requested an order requiring Defendants to search for and produce responsive documents from January 1, 2020, through April 30, 2024. For Request Nos. 7, 25, 26, and 33, they requested a modified period ending February 28, 2025.
Parties’ Positions
Lead Plaintiffs argued that pre-class-period documents could help show whether Defendants knew about or relied on daigou, described in the letter as an illicit gray-market sales practice prevalent in Asia. They also argued that post-class-period documents could help show what Defendants knew about daigou, the effect of that practice on the company’s financial results, whether earlier statements were false or misleading, and loss causation—the connection between the alleged misconduct and investors’ losses.
Lead Plaintiffs stated that the parties had met and conferred through telephone calls, correspondence, and a lead-trial-counsel conference, but remained at an impasse. They said Defendants had offered narrower searches, including searches of 2020 documents from only two custodians and post-class-period discovery limited to 90 days after the class period. The letter stated that Defendants had produced no substantive documents as of that time. These descriptions are Lead Plaintiffs’ positions in the letter, not findings made by the court in the text provided.
Order
The handwritten order on the letter states: “Defendants shall respond” by Tuesday, August 5, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. Judge Arun Subramanian therefore set a deadline for Defendants’ response. The text provided does not state that the court granted or denied the request to compel discovery, resolve the relevant time periods, or otherwise decide the underlying discovery dispute.
Classification
This is a procedural order concerning discovery. It sets a response deadline and does not decide the merits of the requested document production.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.