Court Denies Motion To Compel Where Broad Request For Communications Exceeded Narrow 'Impetus' For Discovery

In an ANDA litigation, the District of Delaware recently denied the defendants' motion to compel the production of correspondence between the plaintiffs' testifying expert and a third-party analyst who had performed experiments and provided data used by the testifying expert. The court found that the scope of material sought by the motion was overbroad and disproportionate to the needs of the case.

As part of the plaintiffs' infringement case, the plaintiffs' expert engaged a third-party analyst to perform solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) tests. The expert then used the data from those tests as a "filter" in later ssNMR experiments to determine if the defendants' proposed ANDA products contained any crystalline material claimed by the plaintiffs' patent.