Court Denies Meta’s Motion to Compel Discovery From Apple

U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia DeMarchi for Northern California in San Jose denied Meta’s motion to compel discovery from Apple, said her Friday order (docket 5:22-cv-04325). The court accepts Meta’s “characterization” that the discovery it seeks from non-party Apple’s competitive ambitions in the virtual-reality fitness app landscape “is highly relevant to its defenses” in the FTC’s lawsuit to block Meta’s Within Unlimited buy on antitrust grounds, said DeMarchi. But the court “is not persuaded that Meta requires the relief it seeks here in order to fully explore in deposition the information it believes is critical to its defenses,” she said. Meta’s main concern is that because Apple is a competitor, “its review and selection of documents for production will be colored by competitive bias, even if its counsel endeavor to conduct the review and production in good faith,” said the order. For this reason, Meta says, the proposed “custodial searches” it seeks in discovery are necessary to provide an objective check on Apple’s production of witnesses and documents, it said. But the court is “skeptical of the premise that Apple’s status as Meta’s competitor necessarily implies that Apple’s counsel and the company representatives working with counsel cannot be relied upon to comply with their discovery obligations,” said the order. “That premise finds no support in the case law” before the court, and Meta “points to no other facts or circumstances” indicating that an objective check on Apple’s production “is warranted here,” it said.