Blue Cross Blue Shield Association National Employee Benefits Committee v…
Blue Cross Blue Shield Association National Employee Benefits Committee v. Allianz Global Investors U.S. LLC
- Katherine Failla
- 1:20-cv-07606
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 5
In Blue Cross Blue Shield Association NEBC v. Allianz Global Investors, Judge Failla denied the document request and granted the custodian request in part.
NEBC, Aon, and the requested document custodians; the order limits additional document production but requires Aon to add four custodians for specified periods.
What happened
In Blue Cross Blue Shield Association National Employee Benefits Committee v. Allianz Global Investors U.S. LLC, the National Employee Benefits Committee asked the court to require Aon to produce all non-privileged documents concerning Structured Alpha and to add five document custodians.
Aon opposed both requests, arguing that it had already produced extensive Structured Alpha-related materials and that the additional documents and custodians would be speculative, duplicative, and burdensome. The court agreed that the request for all additional documents was disproportionate to the needs of the case.
Judge Katherine Polk Failla denied the request for a premotion conference and denied the motion to compel all Structured Alpha-related documents. She granted in part the motion to add five custodians, ordering Aon to add Allen Cheng, Griffin Keenan, Riccardo Lawi, and Richard Mohr for specified date ranges, but declined to require additional production from Erol Alitovski.
The detailed version
- Blue Cross Blue Shield Association National Employee Benefits Committee v… · No. 1:20-cv-07606
- Katherine Failla
- May 2, 2022
Background
The National Employee Benefits Committee (NEBC) sought an order requiring Aon to produce all responsive, non-privileged documents in its possession concerning Structured Alpha. NEBC also sought to add five document custodians: Allen Cheng, Griffin Keenan, Riccardo Lawi, Richard Mohr, and Erol Alitovski.
Aon opposed the requests. It argued that the demand for all Structured Alpha-related documents was overly broad and disproportionate, particularly because Aon had already produced seven categories of documents concerning Structured Alpha, including documents about advice to other clients, general analysis, risk reports, communications from Allianz, and documents used to advise NEBC. Aon stated that it had reviewed more than 340,000 documents and produced 130,675 documents between April 2021 and January 2022.
Aon also argued that adding the five custodians would be premature and disproportionate. It had offered to add Cheng, Keenan, Lawi, and Mohr for narrower periods and had already added Alitovski as a single-issue custodian concerning the RiskMetrics platform.
Court’s Analysis
The court concluded that the possibility that additional documents concerning Aon’s advice to clients about Structured Alpha funds other than those in which NEBC invested was sufficiently speculative to make NEBC’s request disproportionate to the needs of the case. The court noted that Aon had already produced documents in several broad categories addressing Aon’s knowledge of Structured Alpha. The court therefore denied the motion to compel Aon to produce all responsive, non-privileged Structured Alpha documents.
The court granted in part NEBC’s request to add five custodians. It ordered Aon to add:
- Allen Cheng, for January 1, 2020, through August 7, 2020; - Griffin Keenan, for January 1, 2018, through August 7, 2020; - Riccardo Lawi, for October 1, 2019, through December 31, 2019; and - Richard Mohr, for October 1, 2019, through December 31, 2019.
As to Erol Alitovski, the court agreed with Aon that NEBC had not shown that he was likely to possess unique, relevant, and noncumulative documents that had not already been produced. The court did not order additional custodian production from him.
Disposition
The court denied NEBC’s request for a premotion conference regarding its anticipated motion to compel. It denied the motion to compel production of all Structured Alpha-related documents and granted in part the motion to add five custodians. The clerk was directed to terminate the pending motions at docket numbers 154 and 156. Judge Katherine Polk Failla signed the order on May 2, 2022.
Read the full 5-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.