Compliance With Meet And Confer Obligations Under The Federal Rules

In Wilbert v. Pyramid Healthcare, Inc., d/b/a Silvermist Recovery Center, et al., the plaintiff filed suit alleging pregnancy-based discrimination and harassment, culminating in her termination. According to the court, the parties never agreed on how to handle the discovery of electronically stored information (ESI) in connection with the litigation. For purposes of this blog post, the parties were before the court on a motion to compel filed by the plaintiff.

In this decision, the district judge provided an in-depth discussion of parties' meet-and-confer obligations prior to filing a motion.

First, the court cited Rule 26's requirements of relevance and proportionality: "Parties may obtain discovery regarding any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party's claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case."¹ The court then referred to Federal Rule of Evidence 401 on relevance, explaining that information is relevant if "it has any tendency to