Brown v. Cover Girl Cosmetics
- Analisa Torres
- 1:22-cv-02696
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 4
In Brown v. Coty, Inc., Judge Torres ordered the parties not to proceed with discovery until an operative plan exists.
The plaintiffs and Coty, Inc.; the order controls when discovery may proceed and requires the parties to submit an amended case-management plan.
What happened
In Brown v. Coty, Inc., plaintiffs allege that two waterproof mascara products contain undisclosed toxic substances called PFAS. The parties disagreed about whether discovery could continue while Coty’s motion to dismiss the amended complaint remained pending.
Plaintiffs said discovery was already underway and was needed to investigate how PFAS entered the products. Coty argued that discovery had ended when the court dismissed the original complaint and should remain closed because the amended complaint was also challenged. The court had not issued an order staying discovery, but the latest case-management plan had set a May 26, 2023 deadline for fact discovery.
Judge Analisa Torres ordered the parties not to proceed with discovery until there was an operative case-management plan. She directed them to jointly submit an amended plan by December 18, 2023.
The detailed version
- Brown v. Cover Girl Cosmetics · No. 1:22-cv-02696
- Analisa Torres
- Nov. 16, 2023
Background
This order addresses a discovery dispute in a putative class action. Plaintiffs allege that two waterproof mascara products—Lash Blast Volume and Clump Crusher—contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called PFAS, that were not disclosed on the products’ labels or publicly available ingredient lists.
The court dismissed the original complaint on March 29, 2023. Plaintiffs then filed an amended complaint on May 12, 2023, and Coty moved to dismiss that pleading on July 11, 2023. The motion to dismiss was fully briefed by September 15, 2023, but the court had not ruled on it when the parties raised this dispute.
The Parties’ Positions
Plaintiffs argued that discovery remained open because the court had not ordered a stay. They said the parties had already exchanged some discovery, but that Coty had produced only a small number of documents and had not provided information about relevant employees, data sources, search terms, manufacturing processes, quality-control procedures, raw materials, or product testing. Plaintiffs requested permission to resume the discovery that had been underway while the court considered the motion to dismiss.
Coty argued that discovery ended when the court dismissed the original complaint and terminated or adjourned the existing deadlines. It maintained that no operative complaint or discovery schedule existed and that plaintiffs were not entitled to use discovery to determine whether they had a legally sufficient claim. Coty also argued that the amended complaint suffered from deficiencies similar to those identified in other PFAS-related product cases.
Ruling
Judge Analisa Torres stated that the court had not stayed discovery. However, the court noted that the most recent case-management plan ordered fact discovery to close by May 26, 2023. The court ordered that the parties “shall not proceed with discovery until there is an operative case management plan.” It further ordered the parties to jointly submit an amended case-management plan by December 18, 2023.
This order resolved the discovery-management dispute. It did not rule on Coty’s pending motion to dismiss the amended complaint.
Read the full 4-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.