Howington v. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

Background

The parties asked the court to resolve a discovery dispute about whether Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could redact information about visa type or immigration status from documents that otherwise respond to the plaintiffs’ requests, particularly Request for Production (RFP) 13.

The court had previously ruled that TSMC did not have to produce visa information or employee- or applicant-specific permanent-labor-certification and green-card information from company-wide human-resources data sources in response to RFPs 1 through 4. That earlier ruling noted that the plaintiffs alleged discrimination based on race, national origin, and citizenship, rather than visa type or immigration status. The court clarified here that the earlier ruling did not decide whether visa or immigration-status information could ever be relevant in this case, and did not authorize TSMC to unilaterally redact such information from otherwise responsive documents on relevance grounds.

Court’s Analysis

The court stated that a party generally may not redact or withhold irrelevant portions of a document that also contains relevant and responsive information. It therefore ruled that, as a general matter, neither TSMC nor the plaintiffs may redact information from otherwise responsive documents based on relevance.

Regarding RFP 13 specifically, the court had already ordered TSMC to produce all documents responsive to that request for the relevant time period. TSMC therefore may not redact information from those documents on relevance grounds.

TSMC raised a separate concern that information—particularly employee names linked to visa type or immigration status—should be protected because non-party employees have substantial privacy interests. TSMC proposed redacting only employee names. The plaintiffs opposed that proposal, arguing that the names could be relevant in some circumstances and that the protective order provided sufficient protection against inadvertent disclosure. The court found that the record was not sufficiently developed to resolve the parties’ dispute about possible privacy redactions.

Order

The court ordered TSMC to disclose to the plaintiffs’ counsel no more than five documents with exemplary proposed privacy redactions by December 2, 2025. The parties must confer about those proposed redactions and try to reach a resolution.

If a dispute remains, the parties may file a joint discovery-dispute letter by December 12, 2025. Documents containing disputed proposed redactions should be submitted to the court for private judicial review. The parties may change these deadlines through a stipulation filed with the court. Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi signed the order.