In re: Elysium Health-Chromadex Litigation
- Lewis Liman
- 1:17-cv-07394
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 4
In re Elysium-ChromaDex Litigation: Judge Liman denied Elysium’s motion to compel because discovery requests came after the deadline.
Elysium Health’s effort to obtain discovery responses from ChromaDex was affected; the court denied Elysium’s motion to compel.
What happened
In re: Elysium Health-Chromadex Litigation involved Elysium Health’s request for responses to interrogatories and requests for admission served on ChromaDex. Elysium argued that the requests were timely under the discovery schedule.
ChromaDex said the requests were late because the deadline for fact discovery was February 9, 2021. Elysium disagreed, pointing to a later April 23 deadline for completing all discovery and arguing that its requests were proper.
Judge Lewis J. Liman denied the motion to compel. He ruled that his prior orders clearly set February 9, 2021, as the deadline for all fact discovery, and that later deadlines applied only to expert discovery.
The detailed version
- In re: Elysium Health-Chromadex Litigation · No. 1:17-cv-07394
- Lewis Liman
- Apr. 16, 2021
Background
Elysium Health asked the court to compel ChromaDex, Inc. to respond to Elysium’s Second Set of Interrogatories and First Set of Requests for Admission. The requests sought, among other things, information about the factual support for ChromaDex’s contentions and admissions concerning the authenticity and admissibility of documents.
Elysium served the interrogatories on March 15, 2021, and the requests for admission on March 23, 2021. ChromaDex notified Elysium that it would not respond because the requests were late. Elysium argued that the case schedule allowed discovery through April 23, 2021, and that its requests were timely under the rules governing contention interrogatories—questions asking an opposing party to identify the facts supporting its claims or defenses. Elysium also argued that its requests did not improperly exceed the interrogatory limit and that ChromaDex’s objections to the requests for admission were inadequate.
Court’s Ruling
The court denied the motion to compel. Judge Lewis J. Liman held that the court’s January 19, 2021 opinion and order, together with earlier orders, clearly established February 9, 2021, as the deadline for all fact discovery. The later discovery deadlines applied only to expert discovery. Because Elysium served its interrogatories and requests for admission months after the fact-discovery deadline, the court denied the motion without reaching Elysium’s other arguments about the requests’ propriety or ChromaDex’s objections.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.