In re Google RTB Consumer Privacy Litigation
- Yvonne Rogers
- 4:21-cv-02155
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 3
In In re Google RTB Consumer Privacy Litigation, Judge Demarchi ordered Google to re-review disputed privilege entries and provide fuller logs.
Google must re-review the challenged entries, provide additional privilege-log information, and produce documents when required. The plaintiffs must confer with Google and file a status report about remaining disputes.
What happened
In In re Google RTB Consumer Privacy Litigation, plaintiffs challenged more than 5,000 of Google’s 10,525 entries claiming documents were protected from disclosure. Plaintiffs said Google’s logs did not provide enough information to evaluate those claims.
The court ordered Google to re-review all 5,177 challenged entries that had not already been re-reviewed. Google must produce documents when it withdraws or changes a protection claim and must provide detailed information for any claims that remain, including the document’s date, participants, subject, and claimed protection.
The parties must then discuss the remaining disputes and submit a joint status report. Judge Virginia K. Demarchi entered this order on March 27, 2023.
The detailed version
- In re Google RTB Consumer Privacy Litigation · No. 4:21-cv-02155
- Yvonne Rogers
- Mar. 27, 2023
Background
The court considered the parties’ joint status report about remaining disputes over Google’s claims that documents were protected by attorney-client privilege or another protection from disclosure. Plaintiffs continued to dispute more than 5,000 of Google’s 10,525 privilege-log entries. Plaintiffs argued that the information in the logs was insufficient to determine whether Google’s claims were proper.
The court agreed that Google’s entries generally did not provide enough information to assess the claims. It also noted that many entries did not include information that the Ninth Circuit has said is sufficient to make an initial showing of privilege or protection. The court further observed that Google had not asserted its claims in a sufficiently categorical way to allow the court to resolve groups of similar documents without information about each individual document.
Order
Because of the number of disputed entries, the court said it could not review each document privately or consider briefing on each entry. It rejected plaintiffs’ proposed statistical-sample approach because the proposal did not explain how resolving the sampled disputes would resolve the remaining disputes. Google’s proposal covered only a limited subset and did not explain how to address the rest.
The court ordered Google to:
- Re-review the documents among the 5,177 challenged entries that it had not already re-reviewed, completing that review by April 21,
- 2. Promptly produce, on a rolling basis and no later than April 28, 2023, documents for which Google withdrew or modified its claim, either in full or with appropriate redactions.
- For any privilege or protection claims that remained, provide plaintiffs with specified information for each entry by May 5,
- The information must include the date; author, sender, or custodian; known recipients; attorneys involved; the document’s nature and subject; the protection claimed; and an explanation sufficient for the court to evaluate the claim without privately reviewing the document.
- Provide additional information about distribution lists, including their current membership, their nature, any recipients who were not Google employees, and why disclosure to the list did not destroy confidentiality where applicable.
The parties were required to confer after Google served the updated privilege log. By May 19, 2023, they had to file a joint status report of no more than 1,000 words summarizing the remaining disputes and proposing ways to resolve them efficiently, with the disputed privilege-log entries attached.
Ruling and Effect
The court ordered further discovery procedures; it did not determine in this order whether the individual documents were actually privileged or protected. The order directly imposed review, disclosure, and reporting obligations on Google and required plaintiffs and Google to continue working toward resolution of the remaining disputes. Judge Virginia K. Demarchi signed the order as a United States magistrate judge.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.