Ill. Judge Weighs Naming Professor as Special Master in Fake Ringtones Case

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Gilbert for Northern Illinois in Chicago is considering appointing research professor Maura Grossman, a specialist in e-discovery, as the special master in the case brought by plaintiffs Craigville Telephone and Consolidated Telephone against T-Mobile for T-Mobile’s alleged use of fake ringtones to cover up its dropping of expensive rural calls, said Gilbert’s signed order Wednesday (docket 1:19-cv-07190). He scheduled a telephone status hearing Aug. 11 at 10 a.m. to discuss other potential candidates. The plaintiffs, over T-Mobile’s opposition, have been pressing the court for months to appoint a special master to supervise discovery (see 2303140034). The court considered T-Mobile’s arguments that a special master isn’t necessary because there are no exceptional conditions in the case, but the court disagrees, said Gilbert’s order. “The sheer number of discovery disputes” the parties placed before the court has been “a consistent theme or drumbeat” since the case was referred to Gilbert two years ago for discovery supervision, it said. That indicates the parties “need a dedicated resource to resolve or help them resolve discovery disputes that arise with startling regularity if they are to move this case forward productively and in a timely way,” it said. A big complicating factor in the case is that T-Mobile designated 99.5% of the nearly 35,000 pages of documents produced in discovery as confidential, said Gilbert’s order. The court doesn’t have “the time or judicial resources to review hundreds or thousands of documents” to determine if T-Mobile “properly has designated its documents as confidential,” it said. “This is an example of a task more appropriate for a special master,” it said. The court concluded it’s “fair” for the parties to split the monthly costs of a special master 50-50, said the order. Grossman, a lawyer, is a research professor at University of Waterloo's School of Computer Science in Ontario, Canada. Her current hourly rate is $900 “for matters such as this,” the order said.