Opinion
CA No. 09C-11-219.
Submitted: October 13, 2010.
Decided: October 27, 2010.
On Defendant Warren Pumps, LLC's Exception to the Special Master's September 16, 2010 Ruling on the Issue of Timeliness OVERRULED
This 27th day of October, 2010, it appears to the Court that:
1) Defendant Warren Pumps, LLC ("Warren") filed these exceptions to the Special Master's September 16, 2010 decision granting in part Plaintiff's motion to compel and denying Warren's motion for protective order, on the basis that the Special Master failed to consider and rule upon Warren's objections to the timeliness of Plaintiff's motion.
2) Under the Master Trial Scheduling Order (MTSO), objections to final discovery requests in this case were to be filed by June 4, 2010, and the deadline for motions to compel was June 11. Plaintiff timely served Warren with interrogatories and requests for production on May 21, which was the deadline for final discovery requests. Warren's responses were
1) served on June 21, and included general and specific objections to the scope of Plaintiff's requests. According to Plaintiff, Warren provided no substantive responses to the disputed interrogatories.
3) On July 7, Plaintiff's counsel notified Warren that Plaintiff considered Warren's discovery responses deficient and viewed Warren's objections as baseless. The parties attempted to resolve these alleged deficiencies and Warren's objections without intervention by the Court. When the parties' initial efforts failed, Plaintiff filed a motion to compel on July 15. Before the motion was heard, however, the parties reached an agreement whereby Warren offered to supplement its responses in exchange for Plaintiff's withdrawing the motion to compel. Plaintiff expressly stated that the agreement would not negate his right to file a subsequent motion to compel pending a review of Warren's supplemental responses.
4) Pursuant to the parties' agreement, Warren served supplemental responses to Plaintiff's discovery requests on August 10. As with the initial responses, Warren's supplemental filing included general and specific objections to Plaintiff's requests. On August 19, Plaintiff again informed Warren that he considered its discovery responses inadequate. When further attempts at informal resolution between the parties proved fruitless, Plaintiff filed another motion to compel on August 24. In addition to responding to Plaintiff's motion, Warren filed a motion for a protective order. Both motions were heard by the Special Master on September 16, 2010.
5) The parties' substantive dispute primarily focused on whether Kelley was entitled to broad discovery into Warren's product shipments to the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, during his twenty-three years of employment there. After hearing the parties' arguments, the Special Master issued a bench ruling denying Warren's motion for a protective order and granting Kelley's motion to compel, albeit with some limitations upon the parameters of the required discovery. The Special Master explained that his ruling was intended to serve as broad "guidance" to aid the parties in continued conferral over the particular information available and the mechanism of production:
I think, in reliance under the broad standard under Rule 26 . . . that it's least within the realm and the parameters of Rule 26 for Warren Pumps to make available for inspection, if not to produce — and perhaps just making it available for inspection would be less burdensome — documents relating to pumps that Warren Pumps shipped to that shipyard during that time period as to at least the types of vessels that the plaintiff identified as the vessels that he worked on. . . . And I would grant the motion to compel to the extent that Warren Pumps' knowledge of the dangers of asbestos or the extent to which it manufactured, say, hundreds of asbestos-containing parts versus was it only three or four does seem to fall within the broad parameters of Rule 26.
Hr'g Tr. 42:13-43:6, 45:10-16, Sept. 16, 2010. During a telephonic hearing in another case involving the same counsel, the Special Master noted that there had been a timeliness issue regarding Kelley's motion to compel, "but that was timely filed and in any event addressed." Tr. of Mot. for Issuance of a Commission at 12:9-10, In re Asbestos Litig. (Leonard), C.A. No. 09C-11-034 (Del. Super. Sept. 30, 2010). The Special Master went on to note that his ruling on Kelley's motion to compel "can't be used as a sort of Pandora's Box to sort of pry open all sorts of other discovery." Id. at 12:10-12. As part of the same discussion, the Special Master also acknowledged "the importance of enforcing deadlines and not allowing fact discovery to become a moving target particularly as you get close to trial." Id. at 10:22-25.
Warren contends that the Special Master's ruling failed to address its argument that Plaintiff's motion to compel should have been denied as untimely. Warren urges this Court to "enforce the deadlines explicitly laid out in the Master Trial Scheduling Order" by reversing the Special Master's decision.
Exceptions of Def. Warren Pumps, LLC to the Special Master's Sept. 16, 2010 Decision 1.
6) With regard to non-dispositive pretrial issues, the decisions of the Special Master will be upheld unless they are clearly erroneous. Although this Court often has occasion to remind counsel of the importance of its deadlines, litigation deadlines and time limits ultimately exist to preserve fairness. The Court's broad discretion over scheduling issues and the management of its docket extends to the discovery process. In certain situations, considerations of substantial justice may lead the Court to exercise that discretion by granting a motion to compel filed after the applicable deadline. Upon review of the record and the parties' filings in this matter, the Court concludes that the Special Master's decision was not clearly erroneous.
See In re Asbestos Litig., 1994 WL 721765 (Del. Super. July 19, 1994).
See Atkins v. Hiram, 1993 WL 545416, at *4-5 (Del. Ch. Dec. 23, 1993).
7) Implicit in the Special Master's decision on the merits of Plaintiff's motion to compel was the conclusion that Plaintiff acted permissibly in filing his motion outside the MTSO deadlines. Viewing the challenged ruling in the context of the full sequence of events preceding Plaintiff's motion, the Court finds that the Special Master properly exercised discretion in granting Plaintiff's motion notwithstanding its lateness. Plaintiff timely served his discovery requests upon Warren. As the Special Master's substantive ruling established, many of those requests sought discoverable information. The objections in Warren's responses were raised more than two weeks after its deadline for discovery objections passed, and ten days after Warren's motion to compel deadline under the MTSO. In other words, strict and unthinking adherence to the MTSO would have required Warren to file a motion to compel that anticipated and responded to objections from Warren that had not been made within the time period set forth in the MTSO.
8) Additional delays were occasioned by the parties' failed mutual attempts to resolve their dispute without involving the Court, including the agreement by which Plaintiff agreed to withdraw his first motion to compel. As Warren acknowledges, Plaintiff made clear that his acceptance of that agreement was not intended to negate his right to file another motion to compel in the future. Warren correctly notes that Plaintiff did not file for an extension of time with the Court at that juncture. A motion to extend the filing deadline would have been the preferred course of action from the perspective of the Court's management of its own docket, but Plaintiff's omission in this regard did not adversely affect Warren. This was not a situation in which the party seeking discovery unilaterally and inexplicably slumbered upon his right to pursue a motion until after the deadline, such that the opposition could claim unfair surprise and prejudice. Warren's own failures to comply with the MTSO, its awareness of the nature of the parties' dispute since early July, its involvement in the agreement that led to Plaintiff's withdrawing his earlier-filed motion, its efforts to arrive at an informal resolution to this discovery dispute as Plaintiff's deadline receded further into the past, and the merits of Plaintiff's motion all supported the Special Master's ruling that Plaintiff was entitled to discovery despite filing his motion to compel after the deadline. Although the Special Master did not expressly reject Warren's argument, he could not have granted any portion of Plaintiff's motion without concluding that Plaintiff's failure to meet the MTSO deadline was justified. The record provided ample support for the Special Master to reach this conclusion in the proper exercise of his discretion. Under the circumstances, the Court cannot conclude that the Special Master erred in not directly articulating that the MTSO deadlines would not preclude Plaintiff from compelling responses to its requests for discoverable information.
Although it does not provide a basis for the Court's decision, the Special Master's comments during the hearing in the Leonard case confirm that the Special Master reached his decision with full awareness of Warren's position that Plaintiff's motion was untimely.
9) For the foregoing reasons, Warren's exceptions to the Special Master's September 16, 2010 ruling regarding timeliness are OVERRULED, and the decision of the Special Master is AFFIRMED.
IT IS SO ORDERED.