IN RE PORK ANTITRUST LITIGATION

Background

Certain plaintiffs—Sysco Corporation, Amory Investments LLC, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—filed a motion to compel Defendant JBS USA Food Company to provide testimony about two topics in a corporate deposition under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(b)(6). The topics concerned JBS’s policies and codes of conduct related to antitrust laws and corresponding written policies. Other direct-action plaintiffs later joined the objection to the magistrate judge’s ruling.

JBS objected to the two topics and stated that it would not provide a corporate representative to testify about them. The parties held a telephone conference about other deposition topics on September 22, 2022, but did not discuss Topics 20 and 23. The plaintiffs filed their motion to compel on November 14, 2022.

Magistrate Judge John Docherty orally denied the motion at the end of a December 9, 2022 hearing. He found the motion untimely, determined that the parties had not satisfied the meet-and-confer requirement, and considered the requested discovery disproportionate to the needs of the case.

Standard of Review

The district court reviewed the magistrate judge’s nondispositive pretrial order under the deferential standard in 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1)(A), Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 72(a), and District of Minnesota Local Rule 72.2(a)(3). The court could reverse only if the order was clearly erroneous or contrary to law. A decision is clearly erroneous when the reviewing court has a firm conviction that a mistake was made.

Analysis

Timeliness. The plaintiffs argued that their motion was timely because the parties had stipulated to extend the deadline for fact discovery and nondispositive motions to November 14, 2022. The court held that Pretrial Order No. 1 changed the deadline to October 31, 2022, and applied that deadline to all cases and parties, including actions that began in the District of Minnesota. Because the motion was filed on November 14, the court found no clear error in the magistrate judge’s timeliness ruling.

Meet and confer. The court held that the plaintiffs did not satisfy the required meet-and-confer process. Although the parties discussed other matters concerning the corporate deposition, they did not discuss Topics 20 and 23. The written exchanges and drafts did not substitute for the required personal contact because the applicable order required the parties to confer in person, by telephone, or by videoconference about the disputed matters.

Proportionality. The court also upheld the magistrate judge’s consideration of whether the requested discovery was proportional to the needs of the case. The magistrate judge considered that the topics had not been discussed at a case-management conference, included in a stipulation, or addressed at the deposition, and that approximately twenty direct-action plaintiffs had not joined the motion when it was filed. The later joinders did not establish clear error because they occurred more than a month after the motion was filed.

Disposition

Judge John R. Tunheim concluded that the magistrate judge did not commit clear error in denying the motion to compel. The court overruled the Certain Direct-Action Plaintiffs’ and Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s objections to the magistrate judge’s December 9, 2022 order denying the motion to compel.