James, Teresa J., United States Magistrate Judge
Defendants Premium Beef Feeders, LLC Power Plus Beef Feeders, LLC d/b/a Power Plus Feeders, LLC moved the district court to compel plaintiff Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation to product all documents responsive to its "Request No. 31" of its First Requests for Production of Documents.
Defendants’ counterclaim alleged that Plaintiff breached the parties’ Cattle Procurement and Feeding Agreement at issue in this case by, inter alia, failing to execute and/or operate certain risk management and/or hedging strategies for the cattle and grain associated with the cattle purchased pursuant to the Agreement in a reasonably prudent manner.
Plaintiffs responded to Request No. 31 with a general objection, contending the Request sought information outside the relevant time frame of the dispute, and also contained information protected by the attorney-client privilege. Plaintiffs promised to identify those privileged documents on a privilege log, and to produce the log.
During the nine months following Plaintiff’s response, the parties exchanged thousands of pages of documents as they produced responsive documents and supplemented their production on a rolling basis. The parties agreed not to withhold any documents other than those that counsel discussed.
During additional discovery, Farrin Watt, a Cargill employee, was identified as one having authority to make entry or exit decisions with regard to hedging and/or risk management transactions of both cattle and grain pursuant to the Agreement. During his deposition, Defendants learned for the first time of the existence of specific Cargill documents that Cargill had not produced relating to hedging and/or risk management activities of both cattle and grain pursuant to the Agreement. The following day, Defendants’ counsel sent a letter to Plaintiff’s counsel asking Plaintiff to produce the documents Mr. Watt had identified, including a “red book” that contained cattle and grain positions; profit and loss statements; month end statements; confirmation and/or summary of each trade; emails from Mr. Watt and his assistants relating to weekly conference calls; and the source documents Plaintiff used to compile a summary of trades that it had produced.
On April 15, 2015, Defendants’ counsel spoke with one of Plaintiff’s attorneys, to ask if Plaintiff would be producing the requested documents. Counsel indicated that Cargill’s answer would be set forth in letter form, and later that day, Plaintiff’s lead counsel, sent a letter declining to produce the requested documents as irrelevant. Counsel offered to schedule a time for the parties to meet and confer about the issue, but she had left the country the day before, on April 14. Fact discovery closed on April 16, and Defendants therefore were required to file its motion to compel that day.
The district court found that Defendants complied with their Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(1)(1) and D. Kan. R. 37.2 obligations to confer. Defendants acted in a timely fashion and contacted the only Plaintiff’s attorney available before their deadline. In addition, on May 4, 2015, Defendants’ counsel attempted to discuss the issue with Plaintiff’s counsel after she had returned to the country, but she declined to do so.
The court found that documents described by Mr. Watt fell within those called for in Request No. 31, which Plaintiff agreed to produce, and that the relevancy of the documents was apparent on its face. The Court also found that Plaintiff did not satisfy its burden to show that producing the requested documents was unduly burdensome and rejected it's argument that the production was not relevant based on proportionality considerations.
v.
PREMIUM BEEF FEEDERS, LLC, et al., Defendants
Counsel
Holly A. Dyer, Sarah E. Burch, Paige D. Pippin, Foulston Siefkin LLP, Wichita, KS, for Plaintiff.J. Clay Christensen, Jonathan M. Miles, Christensen Law Group, PLLC, Oklahoma City, OK, William R. Sampson, Zach Chaffee–McClure, Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP, Kansas City, MO, for Defendants.