Rattie v. Balfour Beatty Infrastructure, Inc.

Background

Jon-Pierre Rattie alleges that Balfour Beatty Infrastructure, Inc. violated California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and California Family Rights Act. According to the allegations described in the order, Rattie was hired as a Testing and Commissioning Manager, was diagnosed with Common Variable Immune Dysfunction, and worked remotely beginning in 2020. He alleges that Balfour later required him to return physically to work, questioned his ability to perform his job, placed him on involuntary paid leave effective May 13, 2022, and stopped his pay effective August 26, 2022. He remains employed on unpaid Family and Medical Leave Act leave.

Fact discovery closed on July 25, 2023. The court held a hearing on August 10, 2023, and considered supplemental briefing and exhibits concerning the parties’ discovery disputes.

Legal standard

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 permits discovery of nonprivileged information relevant to a claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case. A party withholding information based on attorney-client privilege or the work-product doctrine must identify the claim and describe the withheld material sufficiently for the opposing party and court to evaluate the claim without revealing the protected information.

Requests for admission under Rule 36 may ask a party to admit facts, the application of law to facts, or opinions about either. The court explained that such requests are intended to narrow issues and eliminate matters that are not genuinely disputed, not to force admissions on issues central to the lawsuit or to harass an opposing party.

Rulings on the discovery disputes

Requests for admission. Balfour’s request for an order requiring further responses to Rattie’s requests for admission was granted in part and denied in part.

The court denied further responses to Request Nos. 1, 3, 5, 6, 21, 23, 25, 26, and 27. It concluded that these requests concerned disputed issues involving the nature of Rattie’s leave, his requests to Balfour, his understanding of his job requirements, and his motivations. The court noted that Balfour could later seek sanctions if Rattie should have admitted any matter that Balfour proves to be true.

The court granted Balfour’s request as to Request No. 2. That request asked Rattie to admit that he was placed on paid leave on May 13, 2022. Rattie was ordered to provide a further response explaining his denial in detail within 14 days of the order.

The court denied further responses to Request Nos. 10–12, 20, 22, and 24. Those requests sought admissions about whether certain emails concerned accommodations or job performance. The court stated that requests for admission are not ordinarily designed for that type of inquiry, which may instead be explored during a deposition.

Text messages. Rattie sought an order requiring Balfour to search for and produce potentially relevant text messages on the personal phones of management witnesses Mike Vaz, Peter Webb, and Jeffrey Rogers. The court denied that request because Rattie had not established that Balfour possessed, controlled, or had a legal right to obtain messages from those personal devices. The court also noted that Rattie had not submitted copies of the text messages produced by former Balfour employee Bobby Olupona, which formed the basis for Rattie’s claim that Balfour’s production was incomplete.

The court ordered Balfour to file a sworn declaration stating that it had fulfilled its discovery obligations under Rules 26(b) and 34 by producing relevant text messages and electronic communications in its possession, custody, or control based on the parties’ agreed search terms. If additional production was needed to make the declaration truthful, Balfour had to produce those messages within 14 days.

Mike Vaz’s deposition. The court denied without prejudice Rattie’s request to require Balfour to produce Vaz for a deposition. After Balfour completed any additional text-message production, Rattie was to determine within one week whether to confer with Balfour about promptly scheduling the deposition. Any later dispute would be handled through the court’s ordinary discovery-dispute process.

Rule 30(b)(6) deposition and quarterly reports. The court denied Rattie’s request for an order requiring Balfour to produce one or more witnesses for a deposition under Rule 30(b)(6), which permits an organization to designate a witness to testify about specified topics. Rattie had previously noticed such a deposition and had an opportunity to question Sonya Roberts, Balfour’s Vice-President for Human Resources, about the relevant topics when she testified as a fact witness. The court found the explanation for not doing so unpersuasive.

The court also denied Rattie’s late request for missing quarterly reports because he did not explain why the reports were relevant to his claims.

Attorney-client privilege during Roberts’s deposition. Rattie challenged privilege objections made during Roberts’s deposition and sought in-camera review, meaning private review by the judge, of documents listed on Balfour’s privilege log. The court found that Balfour had established that its in-house counsel provided legal advice concerning Rattie’s accommodation request. It overruled Rattie’s objections without prejudice to renewing them based on new facts about the role of in-house counsel during the relevant events.

Privilege log. Balfour served its privilege log on August 1, 2023, seven days after fact discovery closed and more than four months after the default 30-day period for responding to Rattie’s document requests. The court stated that late service does not automatically waive privilege and requires a case-by-case assessment. Although it found Balfour’s delay especially serious, it also noted that Rattie did not produce his own privilege log until the day fact discovery closed, despite Balfour’s repeated requests. The court therefore declined to find that Balfour waived attorney-client privilege or work-product protection for all documents on its log.

The court denied Rattie’s request for in-camera review of 47 entries on the 66-entry privilege log. Instead, it ordered Balfour to serve a revised privilege log complying with the methods identified in the court’s Civil Standing Order within 14 days. If Rattie continued to object to withheld documents, the parties were required to meet and confer before presenting another dispute to the court.

Disposition

The order granted in part and denied in part the parties’ requests for discovery relief. It resolved discovery issues only and did not decide the merits of Rattie’s employment claims. Judge Seeborg issued the order on August 25, 2023.