NantWorks, LLC v. Niantic, Inc.
- Laurel Beeler
- 3:20-cv-06262
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 2
In NantWorks v. Niantic, Judge Beeler limited discovery responses to financial information from 2019 through the present after finding the earlier period disproportionate.
NantWorks, LLC and the other plaintiffs were required to provide a narrower set of financial information to Niantic, Inc.; the discovery period was limited to 2019 through the present.
What happened
In NantWorks, LLC v. Niantic, Inc., NantWorks challenged the required response to Niantic’s Interrogatory No. 9, which sought financial information from April 8, 2011, to the present.
The court had previously found the information relevant to damages and discoverable. It allowed NantWorks to raise new arguments about the burden and proportionality of collecting the information, but it did not reconsider relevance.
Judge Beeler ruled that Niantic had not shown that financial information reaching back to 2011 was proportional to the case, given that the patents were issued in 2019 and 2020. She limited NantWorks’s response to information from 2019 through the present.
The detailed version
- NantWorks, LLC v. Niantic, Inc. · No. 3:20-cv-06262
- Laurel Beeler
- June 13, 2022
Background
NantWorks moved for permission to seek reconsideration of an earlier order requiring it to respond to Niantic’s Interrogatory No. 9. The interrogatory requested financial information from April 8, 2011, through the present. The court’s earlier order held that the requested information was relevant to damages and could be obtained through discovery.
The court partially granted NantWorks’s reconsideration request by allowing it to present new arguments concerning the burden of producing the information. Those arguments implicated proportionality, which requires discovery’s burden or expense to be justified by its likely benefit. The parties were directed to confer and submit a new joint letter after they could not resolve the dispute.
Ruling
The court stated that it would not revisit its earlier decision about relevance. It focused instead on whether seeking financial information beginning in 2011 was proportional, considering that NantWorks’s asserted patents were issued on September 3, 2019, and May 26, 2020.
Niantic argued that the extended period was justified because NantWorks was seeking millions of dollars in damages. The court found that Niantic had not shown that financial information reaching back to 2011 was proportional to this case. Without a reasonable argument supporting a longer period, Judge Laurel Beeler adopted NantWorks’s proposal and limited the response to Interrogatory No. 9 to information from 2019 through the present. The order resolved ECF No. 106.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.