Local 3621, EMS Officers Union, DC-37, AFSCME, AFL-CIO v. City of New York
- Lewis Liman
- 1:18-cv-04476
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 16
In Local 3621 v. City of New York, Judge Willis ordered more discovery cooperation, denied one data request, and declined sanctions.
The plaintiffs, the City of New York and its agencies, and the parties’ data experts were affected. The order required additional data-related conferences and reporting, denied the requested firefighter-promotion production, and declined sanctions at that time.
What happened
In Local 3621, EMS Officers Union, DC-37, AFSCME, AFL-CIO v. City of New York, the plaintiffs said the City’s production of employment and demographic data was incomplete, inaccurate, and difficult to use. The City argued that it had produced the information required by earlier orders.
The court found that the City’s overall production was usable and that sanctions or an adverse inference were not appropriate at that time. It nevertheless ordered short meetings between the parties’ data experts to address evaluation records, leave dates, missing data, and promotion information, with status updates and proposed timelines due May 17, 2024. The court denied the request to add firefighter promotions to the required production.
Judge Willis explained that the parties should work cooperatively to complete the specific data production while limiting burden and delay. The order required the expert conferences and further status reporting but did not impose sanctions.
The detailed version
- Local 3621, EMS Officers Union, DC-37, AFSCME, AFL-CIO v. City of New York · No. 1:18-cv-04476
- Lewis Liman
- Apr. 26, 2024
Background
The dispute concerned discovery—the exchange of information needed to prepare the case. In December 2023 and earlier orders, the court had directed the City to produce data concerning City employees, including rank, race, gender, evaluations, leave, and promotions. The plaintiffs later asserted that the production remained incomplete and contained significant errors. They asked for severe sanctions, including an adverse inference, which would allow the court to draw a negative conclusion from data they said the City had not produced.
The City responded that it had produced the required rank, race, and gender data and had provided explanations for how the information could be analyzed. The City also disputed some of the plaintiffs’ claims about missing evaluation and promotion records.
Legal standards
The court explained that Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34 generally requires a party to produce relevant information within its possession, custody, or control, including information held by the party’s own agencies. Although Rule 34 does not ordinarily require a party to create an entirely new document, it can require the party to query an existing database and provide the results in a reasonably usable form. The producing party must also take reasonable measures to make the data sufficiently complete and accurate; perfection is not required.
Court’s findings
The court found that the City had taken diligent steps to produce the data and that, overall, the production gave the plaintiffs a functionally adequate ability to access, analyze, search, and display it. For that reason, the court found that no sanction or adverse inference was appropriate at that time.
The court nevertheless identified several issues:
- Rank information: The plaintiffs identified inconsistencies in the rank data. Because the City’s data expert indicated that the problem could be fixed, the court did not issue a specific order on the rank information. The parties had to provide a status update and proposed timeline by May 17,
- - Evaluation forms: The City had said that evaluations from 2004 through 2019 existed only on paper, while the plaintiffs argued that electronic copies were available. The City was directed to investigate internally whether the data had been captured electronically and provide a status update by May 17,
- - Leave dates: The court found that the City’s instructions for calculating leave time did not give the plaintiffs a functionally adequate way to obtain start and end dates. The City was directed to produce an expert from FISA-OPA for a short conference with the plaintiffs’ expert about completing the production and whether a custom database query would reduce the burden. The parties had to provide a status update and proposed timeline by May 17,
- - Missing 2010–2014 data and promotions: The City was directed to produce an expert from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services or the fire department for a short conference with the plaintiffs’ expert about completing the promotion data, including missing promotions from 2010 through
- The parties also had to provide a status update and proposed timeline by May 17,
- - Promotions to firefighter: The plaintiffs sought information about promotions from emergency medical technician to firefighter. The court concluded that the cited discovery requests did not clearly require production concerning the firefighter title and declined to add that title to the existing data-production requirements. “This request is DENIED.” - Other data issues: The court rejected the plaintiffs’ broader challenge to the production, finding on balance that the City’s production was functionally adequate despite concerns about employee-ID matching and the use of preset data-query parameters.
Disposition
The court ordered the parties to have their data experts hold short, cooperative conferences about the identified issues and to submit a status update and proposed timeline for completing the ordered productions by May 17, 2024. The court denied the request to require production concerning promotions to firefighter. It did not impose sanctions or draw an adverse inference at that time. Judge Jennifer E. Willis also directed the parties to limit unnecessary burden and delay because the case had been pending for a long time.
Read the full 16-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.