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Just two weeks ago, we largely praised an MDL court’s handling of sanctions for a plaintiff’s stonewalling in response to discovery obligations, but thought the plaintiff got off pretty light for some really egregious conduct.  Today, we report on a circuit court’s affirmance of discovery sanctions against a plaintiff counsel’s conduct for being overly aggressive in the pursuit of discovery. In light of the holiday today, we will be extra careful in how we describe the plaintiff’s counsel’s conduct and refrain from drawing any conclusion about what the conduct here says about the counsel. We will leave to the reader to decide whether the sanction imposed here—about $25,000 in costs and fees—will have a sufficient deterrent effect and whether the cost of an appeal of a $25,000 sanction after the plaintiff lost summary judgment was worth it.

As you might expect for a case that got to an appeal on a sanction order, the history of Vallejo v. Amgen, Inc., — F.3d –, 2018 WL 4288360 (10th Cir. Sept. 10, 2018), is complicated. Our summary of the pertinent facts is just a summary, with more flavor in the actual case. The case involves an estate suing over a fatal blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome (“MDS”) in a patient taking a well-known biologic for psoriasis. Perhaps because of the track record of the medication and the relative novelty of the claimed injury, the court ordered that the first phase of discovery should focus on whether the medication can cause MDS. (It appears that the medication has been studied in the treatment of MDS in multiple studies among the hundreds completed over decades.) After disputes arose on the scope of such general causation discovery, the magistrate held a hearing at which plaintiff presented an expert, who claimed he needed every clinical trial on the drug and all information relating to possible effects on “red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, or any precursor cells for these blood cell lines.” The magistrate concluded that the scope of discovery sought by plaintiff was unreasonable. Ignoring that, plaintiff served broad discovery requests and the defendant objected on scope, burden, and proportionality, offering to produce a range of documents focused on the medication and MDS. Plaintiff sought to require the defendant to search adverse events for 206 terms, but the magistrate “limited discovery to 15 search terms that provided the most specificity to MDS.”

Plaintiff also sought discovery on other medications of the same class and the defendant objected. The magistrate ordered the defendant to produce non-public studies on the possible relationship between the medication and MDS. Defendant also offered up a global safety officer for deposition and plaintiff demanded the names of everyone who ever worked on adverse event handling for the medication or who had responsibility for any evaluation of its relationship to MDS. The magistrate allowed the plaintiff to depose the safety officer to find out other witnesses as needed. Because the defendant had not submitted affidavits to prove the burden of coming up with a list of everyone who had worked on the medication over decades, the magistrate advised the parties that they would need to “quantifiably explain the burden of providing the requested information” going forward. Plaintiff sought clarification from the magistrate and appealed the discovery order to the district judge. The district judge denied the appeal, noting the role of proportionality in discovery.

Meanwhile, plaintiff noticed up the safety officer for deposition beyond what the magistrate had ruled was permissible, and the magistrate had to issue a protective order until the district court could rule. When the deposition started after the district court’s ruling, plaintiff sought to question beyond the scope of the rulings. The magistrate suspended the deposition for more briefing and to set a time to supervise the deposition when it reconvened. When that happened, plaintiff’s counsel tried to reargue prior rulings, argued with the magistrate, and “asked the witness questions which were explicitly beyond the scope of discovery as ordered by the court.” Thereafter, the magistrate denied a motion to compel additional depositions and document production, noting that plaintiff’s counsel had plenty of information on causation from what had been produced and from other sources. The magistrate also directed plaintiff to disclose the general causation experts that her counsel had claimed to have when arguing with the magistrate during the safety officer’s deposition. Plaintiff again appealed and the district court again denied it.

After all this and some more jockeying, the defendant moved for sanctions for plaintiff’s counsel’s “repeated attempts to circumvent the court’s limitations on the first stage of discovery and abused the judicial process.” Defendant sought about $141,000 in fees and costs and the magistrate awarded about $25,000 for a variety of sanctionable conduct. The district court came to the same conclusion on its de novo review after appeal. After summary judgment was granted because plaintiff failed to name a causation expert, despite the claims of her counsel that she had retained one, the appeal to the Circuit Court followed. If are not exhausted after that recap, then you have more tolerance for discovery fights than do most courts we know. You might also reflect on the question of whether the burdensome discovery plaintiff sought and the fights that she initiated on discovery issues were part of a scheme to force some kind of settlement before having to prove general causation.

In affirming, the Tenth Circuit not only reinforced the limits on what counsel can do when they keep losing discovery fights, but provided guidance on some recurring issues in discovery. We start with the final word:

Attorneys are entitled to advocate zealously for their clients, but they must do so in accordance with the law, the court rules, and the orders of the court. The district court properly exercised its inherent power to sanction Vallejo’s counsel, and we find no abuse of discretion.

Focusing on the motion to compel that plaintiff filed after the first attempt at deposing the safety officer, this was easily characterized as “relitigation of issues already decided by the court.” It did not matter whether plaintiff had a basis for the positions that it took initially. As the magistrate held—within its discretion per the Circuit Court—“absent any change in circumstances, filing additional motions raising the same arguments was harassing, caused unnecessary delay, and needlessly increased the cost of this litigation.”

On the issue of proportionality, the Circuit Court affirmed that proof of burden can be established by means other than sworn statements. While statements in a brief (signed by counsel) are not proof, a court may consider “common sense” in evaluating the burden part of proportionality. In this case, it also had plaintiff’s counsel’s demonstration of how many hits a small portion of plaintiff’s preferred search terms produced. So, plaintiff’s counsel could not excuse misconduct by claiming no limits should have been imposed in the first place.

Plaintiff’s efforts to turn the focus to alleged misrepresentations by the defendant’s counsel were similarly rejected, as the Circuit Court was “satisfied that the district court did not rely on misrepresented facts by [defendant] in issuing its discovery orders.” Nor could she shift the focus to how the magistrate conducted the discovery hearing in terms of questioning of defendant’s expert, whose core opinion was that the Biologic License Application had relevant information on causation. Among other things, the district court did not rely on the defendant’s expert in limiting the scope of discovery. Plaintiff also tried to claim that she should have had access to all the information FDA might consider in evaluating medical causation, but this was a red herring given the difference between FDA standards and court standards, the absence of any MDS signal, and the court’s discretion to limit discovery on general causation. Plaintiff’s last gasp was to claim her case was prejudiced by the sanctions against her, but it was her counsel’s decision to claim she had general causation experts and her failure to name even one when required, instead trying to get by with a designation of an unspecified employee of one of the companies involved with the medication.

In short, plaintiff’s counsel conduct was sanctionable because the court set limits on discovery within its discretion and then plaintiff’s counsel chose to relitigate them and flaunt them until plaintiff lost for the fundamental reason of having no general causation expert. The fact that plaintiff ultimately lost despite pursuing these tactics reinforces that the tactics were obstructionist rather than excusing the tactics themselves. Even on the defense side, where we have been known to litigate aggressively on issues like the scope of discovery and the sufficiency of general causation, Vallejo can be instructive on the need to respect final rulings as the law of the case.