DoorDash, Inc. v. City Of New York
- Analisa Torres
- 1:21-cv-07695
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 8
In DoorDash v. City of New York, Judge Cave partly granted and partly denied plaintiffs’ discovery motion, requiring limited supplementation but no additional interrogatory answers.
DoorDash, Inc., Portier, LLC, GrubHub, Inc., and the City of New York. The order required the City to provide limited supplemental discovery responses but did not require it to answer the remaining interrogatories.
What happened
DoorDash, Inc., Portier, LLC, and GrubHub, Inc. challenged a New York City ordinance requiring certain food-ordering and delivery platforms to disclose customer information to restaurants. During discovery, the companies asked the City to answer more interrogatories and to provide fuller answers to three existing ones.
The court held that the City did not have to answer the remaining interrogatories because the plaintiffs had exceeded the usual limit and had served the requests late in discovery. But the court required the City to identify specific documents supporting two of its First Amendment responses and to identify the legislative records and hearings supporting its Contracts Clause response.
Judge Sarah L. Cave granted the motion in part and denied it in part. The City had to supplement its responses to the three specified interrogatories by June 1, 2023, but it did not have to answer the remaining interrogatories.
The detailed version
- DoorDash, Inc. v. City Of New York · No. 1:21-cv-07695
- Analisa Torres
- May 22, 2023
Background
These consolidated cases concern a New York City ordinance requiring certain third-party food-ordering and delivery platforms to disclose customers’ personal information to restaurants. DoorDash, Portier, and GrubHub asserted claims under the United States Constitution, including the First Amendment and Contracts Clause, as well as provisions of the New York State Constitution. This order addressed discovery only; it did not decide whether the ordinance was lawful.
Fact discovery had closed on May 16, 2023. The plaintiffs had previously served the City with 55 collective interrogatories. They then served another 35 interrogatories, called the “Second Interrogatories.” The City answered the first five from each plaintiff’s set and objected to the rest as exceeding Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 33’s usual limit of 25 interrogatories. The plaintiffs asked the court to compel answers to the remaining interrogatories and to supplement responses to three interrogatories.
Ruling on the additional interrogatories
The court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the City waived its objection to the number of interrogatories. It found that the plaintiffs’ requests, including their subparts, exceeded the applicable limit by considerably more than the stated number of interrogatories. The court also noted that the plaintiffs had been acting together, had agreed to coordinate discovery, and had served the additional requests late in an already extended fact-discovery period. The court therefore did not require the City to answer the remainder of the Second Interrogatories.
Ruling on the three responses
The court found the City’s responses to DoorDash Interrogatory No. 1 and GrubHub Interrogatory No. 2 insufficient to the extent they referred generally to information or documents produced during discovery. The City had to identify, by title, Bates number, or another identifier, the documents on which it intended to rely to support its contention that the ordinance did not regulate the plaintiffs’ speech. The City did not have to provide case law, other legal authorities, or lengthy narrative explanations.
The court also found that the City had to identify the legislative record and hearings on which it intended to rely for its response to Portier Interrogatory No. 4, which concerned the contention that the ordinance served a significant and legitimate purpose under the Contracts Clause. The City could identify those materials by Bates number, date, title, or other information sufficient to allow the plaintiffs to locate them. The court did not otherwise require the City to revise that response.
Disposition
Judge Sarah L. Cave granted the plaintiffs’ motion in part and denied it in part. The City was not required to answer the remaining interrogatories. It was required, by June 1, 2023, to supplement its responses to DoorDash Interrogatory No. 1, GrubHub Interrogatory No. 2, and Portier Interrogatory No. 4 only as described in the order. The court directed the clerk to close the motion.
Read the full 8-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.