Droesch v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.

Background

The plaintiffs filed a wage-and-hour putative class and collective action in September 2020. The court had previously compelled arbitration for Plaintiff Droesch and certain opt-in plaintiffs, conditionally certified a collective under Section 216(b) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, allowed an amended complaint adding named plaintiffs and an Arizona state-law claim, and granted in part and denied in part a later motion to amend. The court also denied Wells Fargo’s motion for summary judgment on the named plaintiffs’ individual claims.

After the summary-judgment ruling, the plaintiffs served two additional notices for depositions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(b)(6), which permits an organization to designate witnesses to testify about specified topics. One notice also requested documents. Wells Fargo moved for a protective order under Rule 26(c), arguing that the plaintiffs needed court permission before serving additional notices and that the requested discovery was irrelevant and unduly burdensome.

Rulings on discovery

The court rejected Wells Fargo’s argument that the plaintiffs were required to obtain permission before serving a second or third Rule 30(b)(6) notice. Instead, it evaluated whether the requested discovery was relevant and consistent with Rule 26(b)(1).

SIEM and the Windows environment. The plaintiffs sought information about whether login and logout data for various computer programs and telephone systems could be located in Wells Fargo’s Security Information and Event Management system, referred to as SIEM. The court granted the protective order as to this inquiry. It found that Wells Fargo’s information-technology specialists had answered the relevant questions in a helpful and non-evasive manner and that Wells Fargo had shown it could not produce the requested data. The court noted that SIEM stored only one year of data, meaning that, as of the order, the available data reached back only to April 2022. The court also found that the plaintiffs had not shown that Wells Fargo had stored the other data they described or that ordering Wells Fargo to store data going forward would be relevant and reasonable.

The court also declined to fault Wells Fargo’s Rule 30(b)(6) witness for not knowing about the company’s cybersecurity programs because the deposition topics had not specifically addressed those programs. Because the plaintiffs’ opposition addressed only the SIEM inquiry, the court granted the protective order as to that deposition notice.

Metrics and the grace period. The court agreed in part with Wells Fargo that the requested employee-performance metrics and quality scores were not relevant to the claims pleaded in the Second Amended Complaint. The plaintiffs alleged that telephone employees performed unpaid work before and after logging into the SoftPhone system, including starting computers and software before their shifts and closing systems afterward. But the court stated that employee metrics did not tend to prove that theory, particularly because the summary-judgment record showed that Wells Fargo’s policy was for employees to manually record all time worked, including time spent working on electronic devices. The court therefore granted the protective order as to most of the metrics-related discovery.

The court treated the requested information about the grace period differently. Because the grace period related to Wells Fargo’s policy requiring employees to record their own time, which Wells Fargo called its “honor system,” the court allowed one additional hour of Rule 30(b)(6) testimony about that relationship.

For the document requests, the court found most requests irrelevant to the pleaded claims or a defense. It identified Request Nos. 7, 9, 11, 12, and 13 as related to Wells Fargo’s honor-system defense but found those requests plainly overbroad. The court granted the protective order except to the extent the requests sought documents showing the relationship between the honor system and the grace period.

Other rulings and disposition

The court overruled the plaintiffs’ objection to Wells Fargo’s reply evidence, finding that the evidence fairly responded to the plaintiffs’ arguments.

The court granted in part and denied in part the administrative motion to seal. The parties could file the attachments under seal, but the court found that the motion did not establish good cause to seal the entire joint statement. The motion to file the joint statement under seal was denied without prejudice to resubmission in compliance with the Northern District of California’s local rule.

Judge Jacquelyn Scott Corley therefore granted in part and denied in part Wells Fargo’s motion for a protective order, granted in part and denied in part the administrative sealing motion, and set a further case-management conference for April 27, 2023. The order disposed of Docket Nos. 153 and 164.