Allianz Global Investors GmbH v. Bank Of America Corporation
- Lorna Schofield
- 1:18-cv-10364
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 5
In Allianz Global Investors v. Bank of America, Judge Aaron granted discovery requests in part and denied them in part, granted other requests, and set further steps.
The order affected the plaintiffs and defendants, as well as Goldman Sachs, SocGen, Barclays, and BlackRock, by imposing discovery-related production, deposition, meet-and-confer, reporting, and scheduling requirements.
What happened
In Allianz Global Investors GmbH v. Bank Of America Corporation, the magistrate judge addressed the parties’ disputes about information and documents in ongoing discovery after a telephone conference and a joint letter.
The court granted in part and denied in part the plaintiffs’ request for information about foreign-exchange traders and supervisors. It also granted requests for a Barclays employee list and documents that SocGen had produced to financial regulators, while denying without prejudice the request for the identity of one former SocGen employee. The court granted in part and denied in part requests concerning BlackRock’s trading-analytics reports and deadlines for producing hit reports, and denied without prejudice a request to set deadlines for revised trading data.
Judge Stewart D. Aaron ordered additional information, meetings between the parties, letters about unresolved disputes, a joint discovery-status report, and another telephone conference. The order did not decide the underlying claims in the lawsuit.
The detailed version
- Allianz Global Investors GmbH v. Bank Of America Corporation · No. 1:18-cv-10364
- Lorna Schofield
- Aug. 31, 2020
Background
After a telephone conference about the parties’ August 26, 2020 joint letter, Magistrate Judge Stewart D. Aaron ruled on several discovery disputes in this action. The order addressed requests involving Goldman Sachs, SocGen, Barclays, BlackRock, the plaintiffs, and the defendants.
Rulings on Plaintiffs’ Requests
The plaintiffs’ request for available information from Goldman Sachs and SocGen about the identities of foreign-exchange traders and supervisors was granted in part and denied in part. Goldman Sachs was ordered to provide reasonably available human-resources information about 14 remaining individuals by September 8, 2020, and information about certain “early traders” by September 14, 2020. SocGen and the plaintiffs were ordered to meet and confer about additional individuals identified from recently produced organizational charts. Any resulting dispute was to be presented to the court by letter no later than September 14, 2020.
The plaintiffs’ request for a list from Barclays of employees who had been suspended, fired, or forced to resign in connection with regulatory or internal investigations concerning the conduct alleged in the Third Amended Complaint was granted.
The plaintiffs’ request for the identity of one SocGen employee who had been suspended, fired, or forced to resign in connection with related investigations was denied without prejudice. SocGen was ordered to continue investigating foreign data-privacy laws and regulations and then meet and confer with the plaintiffs. If the parties could not agree, SocGen was required to file a motion for a protective order by September 21, 2020 explaining why the identity should not be required, subject to necessary confidentiality protections.
The plaintiffs’ request for documents SocGen had previously produced to its prudential regulators in connection with foreign-exchange investigations was granted. The court stated that SocGen had cited no legal authority showing that its compilation or selection of documents made the documents confidential. The court also noted a Federal Reserve regulation stating that confidential supervisory information does not include documents prepared by a supervised financial institution for its own business purposes and in its possession. The court further stated that SocGen did not object to producing the documents themselves.
Rulings on Defendants’ Requests
The defendants’ request to compel BlackRock to answer interrogatories about the destruction of trading analytics reports was granted in part and denied in part. The court found that the interrogatories exceeded the scope permitted by Local Civil Rule 33.3(a). Instead, BlackRock was ordered to provide the information during its Rule 30(b)(6) deposition, which is a deposition in which an organization identifies a representative to testify about specified topics. BlackRock was required to identify the dates when it first communicated with legal counsel and retained counsel concerning potential litigation against any defendant arising from foreign-exchange trading.
The defendants’ request for hit reports by a date certain was granted in part and denied in part. By September 18, 2020, the parties were required to file a letter identifying each plaintiff that had not provided hit counts, describing the efforts made to provide them, and explaining any remaining obstacles. The court stated that it would later set a deadline for those plaintiffs to provide the hit counts.
The defendants’ request for deadlines concerning the plaintiffs’ revised trading data was denied without prejudice. The parties were directed to continue meeting and conferring about the data, including fields the plaintiffs did not intend to provide and the reasons for excluding them. A later appendix was to identify any plaintiff claiming it could not meet a December 31, 2020 deadline and explain why.
Further Proceedings
The parties were ordered to file a joint letter about the status of discovery and any remaining disputes by September 30, 2020, at 6:00 p.m. Eastern time. The letter was also to address negotiations about the number of custodians for the defendants’ supplemental document collection. Judge Stewart D. Aaron ordered the parties to attend another telephone conference on October 2, 2020, at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time.
Nature of the Order
This was a discovery-management order. It resolved particular requests for information, documents, depositions, and deadlines but did not resolve the underlying claims.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.