Borodaenko v. Twitter, Inc.
- Mart
- 3:22-cv-07226
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 5
In Borodaenko v. Twitter, Judge Martínez-Olguín denied plaintiffs’ motion to consolidate three employment cases because consolidation would not promote efficiency.
The plaintiffs and defendants in Borodaenko, and the parties in the proposed Strifling and Zeman consolidations. The cases continued separately after the court denied consolidation.
What happened
In Borodaenko v. Twitter, the plaintiffs asked the court to combine their case with two other cases involving alleged discrimination after Elon Musk acquired Twitter. The proposed cases involved disability, sex, and age-discrimination claims arising from Twitter’s layoffs and workplace ultimatum.
The court denied the motion. It concluded that combining the cases would save little time because the cases were at different stages and several motions were already pending. The court also said the plaintiffs appeared to have created overlapping issues through later amendments to their complaints.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that consolidation would not promote efficient use of judicial resources and declined to exercise the court’s discretion to combine the cases.
The detailed version
- Borodaenko v. Twitter, Inc. · No. 3:22-cv-07226
- Mart
- Aug. 15, 2023
Background
The plaintiffs asked the court to consolidate this case with Strifling, et al. v. Twitter, Inc., et al., No. 22-cv-07739-JST, and Zeman v. Twitter Inc., et al., No. 23-cv-01786-SI. The cases generally arose from events following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, including a reduction in force and a message asking remaining employees to agree to work “long hours at high intensity.”
The Borodaenko plaintiffs alleged disability discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act and, for employees who worked out of California, the California Fair Employment and Housing Act. After an amended complaint, one plaintiff also alleged sex discrimination under Title VII. The Strifling plaintiffs alleged sex discrimination under Title VII and California law, later adding age-discrimination claims. The Zeman plaintiffs alleged age discrimination under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and New York law.
Legal Standard
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 42(a) permits consolidation when cases share a common issue of law or fact. The court explained that consolidation is discretionary and requires balancing possible savings of time and effort against inconvenience, delay, confusion, or prejudice.
Court’s Analysis
The court assumed that the cases might involve common legal or factual issues but concluded that consolidation would not promote judicial economy. Borodaenko and Strifling had already gone through an initial round of motions to dismiss, and a motion to compel arbitration had been filed concerning one plaintiff’s claims in Borodaenko. Motions challenging the pleadings were also pending and ready for decision in all three cases. The court therefore found that little time or effort would be saved by consolidating the cases at that stage.
The court also declined to exercise its discretion under Rule 42(a). It noted that the plaintiffs sought to relate the cases shortly after Borodaenko was reassigned to a new judge. After the court determined that the other cases were not related, plaintiffs in Borodaenko and Strifling—who were represented by the same counsel—amended their pleadings to create overlapping disability, sex, and age-discrimination claims that had not previously been pleaded. The court stated that the plaintiffs appeared to have manufactured the common issues supporting consolidation and that it would not resolve a problem of their own making.
Disposition
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín denied the plaintiffs’ Motion to Consolidate Cases. The order did not decide the underlying discrimination claims.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.