Powers v. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
- Lorna Schofield
- 1:20-cv-02625
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Powers v. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Judge Schofield denied reconsideration of discovery rulings as untimely and unsupported.
Scott Powers and the defendants, particularly Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, because the court denied reconsideration of the prior discovery rulings.
What happened
In Powers v. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Scott Powers sought audit trails, access logs, and other information about electronic medical records. The court had previously denied similar requests as untimely and not proportional to the needs of the case.
Powers later said the defendants had used the records to question Dr. DeMatteo and sought to compel production of additional records. The defendants responded that no audit trails or access logs had been used during that questioning.
Judge Lorna G. Schofield treated Powers’s letter as a request to reconsider the earlier orders and denied it. The court found the request untimely and said it did not identify a change in fact or law or a clear error requiring correction.
The detailed version
- Powers v. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center · No. 1:20-cv-02625
- Lorna Schofield
- Dec. 28, 2020
Background
The court had previously denied Scott Powers’s requests to compel Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to produce audit trails and other metadata concerning the creation, retrieval, updating, and destruction of Erika Zak’s electronic medical records. The October 8, 2020, request was denied as untimely and not proportional to the needs of the case. The court similarly denied a December 4, 2020, request for audit trails and metadata for seven medical records.
On December 23, 2020, Powers filed a pre-motion letter anticipating another request to compel production of view audit trails and access logs for Zak’s electronic medical and health records. Powers asserted that the defendants had used those records to question Dr. DeMatteo. The defendants responded that they had told Powers during discussions between the parties that no claimed audit trails or access logs were used to question Dr. DeMatteo, and that none was shown or mentioned during that examination.
Legal standard
The court explained that reconsideration—a request asking the court to revisit an earlier ruling—is generally appropriate only when the moving party identifies a controlling change in the law, new evidence, or a clear error or manifest injustice. The court also stated that reconsideration is not a way to relitigate old issues, present new theories, or obtain another hearing on the merits.
Ruling
The court construed Powers’s pre-motion letter as a motion for reconsideration of the October 8 and December 4, 2020, orders. It denied the motion because it was untimely and did not identify an intervening change in fact or law or a need to correct a clear error. The Clerk of Court was directed to close the motion at Docket No. 162.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.