Gonzalez v. City of Alameda

Background

The Gonzalez plaintiffs filed a joint discovery letter seeking a protective order. A protective order is a court order limiting or preventing discovery to protect a party or another person from harm or unfairness. The plaintiffs wanted the order to prevent Edith Arenales from contacting, deposing, or attempting to subpoena their retained experts.

The court had consolidated the Gonzalez and Arenales cases for discovery because both involved the same incident, but it had not consolidated them for trial. Arenales had previously sought to consolidate the trials, and the court denied that request because of conflicts that could prejudice the Gonzalez plaintiffs. The parties’ expert-disclosure deadline was July 21, 2023. The Gonzalez plaintiffs gave Arenales’s counsel a courtesy copy of their expert disclosures on that date. Arenales then designated the Gonzalez plaintiffs’ experts as her own. She acknowledged that she had not retained them and said she had instead decided to mutually identify or designate them.

Because the dispute prevented the defendants from deposing the experts, the defendants separately requested an extension of the expert-discovery deadline from September 15 to September 29, 2023.

Court’s analysis

Arenales relied on Penn National Insurance v. HNI Corp. and its discussion of the federal discovery rules governing expert disclosures and depositions. The court found that decision distinguishable because Arenales was not a party in the Gonzalez case and the two cases had not been consolidated for trial. The court therefore found the rule allowing a party to depose another party’s designated expert inapplicable here.

The court reasoned that Arenales could have retained the experts before the disclosure deadline, assuming they agreed to work for her. It held that she could not claim their expert work later by designating them as her own or by participating in their depositions. The court accepted the Gonzalez plaintiffs’ argument that Arenales’s counsel’s participation could prejudice them because the questioning could expose the experts to cross-examination by the defendants that they otherwise would not face.

Ruling

The court granted the Gonzalez plaintiffs’ motion for a protective order to the extent it barred Arenales’s counsel from designating the experts as Arenales’s own, participating in their depositions in this case, or attempting to subpoena them for Arenales’s trial. The footnote states that the plaintiffs’ request to bar Arenales’s counsel from contacting the experts was denied.

The court denied the defendants’ request to extend the expert-discovery deadline as moot. At a hearing on the defendants’ summary-judgment motions, the parties represented that the first expert deposition was scheduled for August 23, 2023, so that deposition could proceed as scheduled. The order was entered by Chief Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu.