This action involves a dispute among owners of a beachfront hotel and condominium units located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Defendant Q Club Hotel, LLC (“Q Club”) owns and manages the Hotel Unit in the Q Club Resort and Residences Condominium (“Condominium”). In that capacity, Q Club markets, manages, and operates a hotel at the Condominium as the “Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort.” Plaintiff Gary Dear and the putative Class Members are owners of one or more of the 333 “Residential Units” in the Condominium. The Class Members claim that Q Club charged them inflated Shared Costs that included charges not recoverable under the uniform Declaration of Club Resort and Residences Condominium (“Declaration”) governing all Residential Units.

Plaintiff retained expert Steven M. Berwick “to provide forensic accounting analysis and render certain expert opinions” regarding Shared Costs. DE 55-12 at 4. Defendant’s experts, Roger S. Cline and Barry Mukamal, filed rebuttal reports challenging Berwick’s methodology and conclusions. DE 58-1 to 58-3 (“Cline Report”); DE 58-4 (“Mukamal Report”). Now Plaintiff seeks to exclude both rebuttal reports for purportedly relying on information not produced in discovery and not disclosed in the deposition of Defendant’s corporate representative, who Plaintiff contends was inadequately prepared. DE 58 at 8–18. Plaintiff also seeks to exclude the Cline Report on the grounds that it allegedly contains legal conclusions, contradicts Defendant’s position on governing instruments, and uses an unreliable source. Id. at 4–8, 19–20.

Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence governs the admission of expert testimony. See Fed. R. Evid. 702.[1] In applying Rule 702, “district courts must act as ‘gatekeepers’ which admit expert testimony only if it is both reliable and relevant.” Rink v. Cheminova, Inc., 400 F.3d 1286, 1291 (11th Cir. 2005) (citing Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 589 (1993)). “District courts are charged with this gatekeeping function to ensure that speculative, unreliable expert testimony does not reach the jury under the mantle of reliability that accompanies the appellation ‘expert testimony.’ ” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). To meet this obligation, courts must perform “a rigorous inquiry” to determine whether:

*2 Id. at 1291–92 (internal quotation marks omitted). “The party offering the expert has the burden of satisfying each of these three elements by a preponderance of the evidence.” Id. at 1292.

Expert reports are also subject to exclusion under Rule 37(c)(1), which governs sanctions for failing “to provide information or identify a witness as required by Rule 26(a) or (e).” Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(c)(1). Rule 26(a)(1)(A) requires a party to disclose and provide to the opposing party “(i) the name ... of each individual likely to have discoverable information ... that the disclosing party may use to support its claims or defenses” and “(ii) a copy ... of all documents, electronically stored information, and tangible things that the disclosing party ... may use to support its claims or defenses.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(a)(1)(C). Rule 26(e) imparts an ongoing obligation to timely “supplement or correct” disclosures if the disclosing party “learns that in some material respect the disclosure or response is incomplete or incorrect, and if the additional or corrective information has not otherwise been made known to the other parties during the discovery process.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(e)(1).

Rule 37(c)(1) precludes a late-disclosing party from using “that information or witness to supply evidence on a motion, at a hearing, or at a trial, unless the failure was substantially justified or is harmless.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(c)(1). “In determining whether the failure to disclose was justified or harmless, [the Eleventh Circuit] consider[s] the non-disclosing party’s explanation for its failure to disclose, the importance of the information, and any prejudice to the opposing party if the information had been admitted.” Lips v. City of Hollywood, 350 Fed.Appx. 328, 340 (11th Cir. 2009) (citing Romero v. Drummond Co., 552 F.3d 1303, 1321 (11th Cir. 2008)). By its language, Rule 37(c)(1) is self-executing.

Plaintiff seeks to exclude both the Cline and Mukamal Reports under Rule 37(c)(1), and also contends that the Cline Report is insufficiently helpful and reliable. The Court does not find exclusion warranted on either basis.

Plaintiff argues that under Rule 37(c)(1), Defendant’s expert reports should be excluded due to alleged deficiencies in the testimony of Defendant’s Rule 30(b)(6) witness, Sergio Pagliery, and/or Defendant’s document production. The Court finds Plaintiff’s proposed remedy, the wholesale exclusion of the expert reports, drastic and improper for the limited discovery violations that Plaintiff may credibly allege.

Plaintiff cites several ways in which he found Pagliery to be inadequately prepared for his deposition, and a review of his testimony reveals that he did not, in fact, provide substantive answers to certain questions on topics properly noticed. See DE 58 at 11–14. However, the answers to most, if not all, material questions that Pagliery was unable to answer rest in the Declaration and other documents produced in discovery, which detail the nature and amount of the items billed to Unit Owners over the years. This information included, but was not limited to, hotel operating statements, general ledgers, JV25 Excel files, billing statements, and a specific list of all expenditures included in Shared Costs after 2012. See DE 66 at 9; DE 66-2 ¶ 2. Plaintiff was given sufficient evidence to analyze and understand why and how the Shared Costs increased, even if Pagliery was unable to provide an explanation in his deposition. Therefore, the claimed inadequacies in Pagliery’s deposition testimony are harmless and do not warrant the wholesale exclusion of Defendant’s experts' reports.

*3 Additionally, Plaintiff identifies several pieces of information in the reports that he claims Defendant failed to produce during discovery. DE 58 at 15. Upon close review of Defendant’s supporting materials, however, the Court finds that nearly all of the information was either provided to Plaintiff in document production or never requested. Any limited failure to disclose other pieces of information was harmless. To the extent that Mukamal relied on information obtained in an interview with the now-deceased Martinus Ammerlaan, such information is discernable from other documents produced by Defendant and Hilton. Plaintiff also could have deposed Defendant’s experts and requested that they bring to the deposition any materials upon which they relied, but Plaintiff elected not to do so.

None of Plaintiff’s additional challenges to the Cline Report undermine its helpfulness or reliability. First, Plaintiff argues that the Cline Report should be excluded for containing improper opinions on the meaning of contractual provisions in the Declaration and other legal conclusions. See DE 58 at 4–8. However, much of what Plaintiff has defined as legal opinions and conclusions are simply the foundation upon which Cline bases his opinion about what could and should be included in an accounting of Shared Costs. This opinion is important for understanding what Cline perceives as deficiencies in Berwick’s economic analysis. Furthermore, the statements that Plaintiff finds objectionable are all contained in the “Background” section of the Cline Report and would not warrant the exclusion of the entire document, which contains relevant and admissible expert opinions on accounting and internal controls in the hotel industry.

Second, Plaintiff maintains that the Cline Report is unreliable because it contains a citation to Wikipedia in its discussion of valet parking as a recoverable Shared Cost. See id. at 19–20. Of course, the reliability of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia of openly editable content, is questionable for technical purposes. But the Wikipedia citation in the Cline Report is used for anecdotal purposes to show how valet parking typically works. The important part of the valet-parking section is not the excerpt from the Wikipedia article, but rather Cline’s opinion that valet parking constitutes an operational process that may be included as a Shared Cost.

Finally, Plaintiff claims that the Cline Report is inconsistent with Defendant’s position that the Declaration is the only instrument that obligates Unit Owners to pay Shared Costs. See id. at 20. Any inconsistency may be explored in cross-examination and is not a basis for striking the report outright.

In light of the foregoing, the Court does not find that Defendant’s experts' reports should be excluded under Rule 37(c)(1), nor does it find that the Cline Report is unhelpful or unreliable for the reasons cited by Plaintiff. It is accordingly

ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that Plaintiff’s Motion to Exclude Defendant’s Experts' Reports [DE 58] is DENIED.

DONE AND ORDERED in Chambers at Fort Lauderdale, Broward County, Florida, this 3rd day of January, 2017.

Under Rule 702, a witness who is qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify in the form of an opinion or otherwise if: