Burns v. Tilebar LLC
- George Daniels
- 1:20-cv-06618
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 6
In Burns v. Tilebar LLC, Magistrate Judge Aaron ordered defendants to produce employee compensation records in a discovery dispute.
James Burns and the defendant companies and individual defendant in the discovery dispute; the order required production of compensation records concerning eight TileBar employees.
What happened
Burns v. Tilebar LLC concerns James Burns’s request for compensation records involving five Orthodox Jewish senior managers and three female employees. Burns said the records were relevant to his religious-discrimination, equal-pay, and retaliation claims.
The defendants objected that the records were irrelevant and highly confidential. The court found the records relevant: the managers’ compensation could support Burns’s discrimination and equal-pay claims, while the female employees’ compensation could support his retaliation claims.
Magistrate Judge Aaron resolved the discovery dispute in Burns’s favor and ordered the defendants to produce the requested compensation documents within seven days. The defendants also had to produce other documents covered by an earlier agreement by May 25, 2021.
The detailed version
- Burns v. Tilebar LLC · No. 1:20-cv-06618
- George Daniels
- May 18, 2021
Background
James Burns brought claims against TileBar LLC, Soho Studio, LLC, Sea Shepherd, Corp., and Eliezer Mechlovitz for religious discrimination, retaliation, and unequal pay under federal, state, and city law. He alleged that Orthodox Jewish men in senior management received more compensation than similarly situated women and non-Orthodox men, including Burns. He also alleged that he complained about the pay disparity and was terminated in retaliation for those complaints.
During discovery—the pretrial process for exchanging relevant information—Burns requested documents showing the compensation paid at TileBar from January 1, 2017, to the present to Craig Swimmer, Ariel Gantz, Nelson Goodman, Sam Dewick, Chaim Rosenbach, Faith Monteiro, Elisheva Neuman, and Malka Pifko. The defendants objected that the requests sought irrelevant and highly confidential information.
Court’s Analysis
The court applied Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26, which permits discovery of nonprivileged information relevant and proportional to the needs of the case. It found that compensation records for Swimmer, Gantz, Goodman, Dewick, and Rosenbach were relevant to Burns’s religious-discrimination and equal-pay claims. The court rejected the defendants’ argument that Burns first had to establish that he was similarly situated to those employees; at the discovery stage, he only had to show that the information was relevant.
The court also found that compensation records for Monteiro, Neuman, and Pifko were relevant to Burns’s retaliation claims. Burns sought those records to support his own allegation that he was terminated for protesting that female employees were paid less than male employees, not to bring claims on the female employees’ behalf.
The court rejected the defendants’ confidentiality objection because a protective order already governed confidential information in the case and expressly included compensation information for people other than Burns.
Ruling
The court resolved the discovery dispute in favor of Burns. It ordered the defendants to produce, within seven days of the opinion and order, documents reflecting the compensation each of the eight identified employees received at TileBar from January 1, 2017, to the present. It also directed the defendants to produce by May 25, 2021, documents responsive to requests on which the parties had previously agreed. The court directed the Clerk of Court to terminate the letter motions filed at ECF Nos. 23 and 26.
Read the full 6-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.