*1 Pending before the Court is plaintiff Mary Bilek's motion to compel discovery [85].[1] The motion is fully briefed. [95, 97, 102]. For the following reasons, the motion is denied.

This case concerns plaintiff's individual claims and a proposed class action under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), 47 U.S.C. § 227; the TCPA's internal do-not-call regulations (IDNC), 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(d); and the Illinois Automatic Telephone Dialers Act, 815 ILCS 305/1, et seq. In her amended complaint, plaintiff alleges, inter alia, that she received a phone call from America's Health Center Inc. (AHC) that began with a prerecorded message offering health-insurance coverage. [76] 7, at ¶ 36. Later during the call, an unidentified person offered to sell plaintiff “a $359.85/month MultiPlan PPO insurance plan underwritten by Chubb” with no deductible and that “included 65% vision coverage, 70% dental coverage, and $3.00 to $5.00 co-pays for prescription drugs.” [Id.] 8, at ¶ 40. Plaintiff alleges that defendant Federal Insurance Company does business under the name “Chubb” [id.] 1, at ¶ 2, and the parties refer to the insurance product that was allegedly marketed to plaintiff during this call as the Accident Sickness Hospital Indemnity Product (ASHIP), [85] 1.

Relevant to the pending discovery dispute, plaintiff seeks certification of the following nation-wide classes under the TCPA and the IDNC regulations:

[76] 14-15.

Plaintiff has served written discovery requests that seek documents and information concerning every phone call that Federal, or any third party acting on Federal's behalf, made from at least January 1, 2017 to the present, during which any Federal insurance product was marketed to the recipient of the phone call. See [85-1] (defendant's objections and answers to plaintiff's first set of interrogatories, requests for production, and requests for admission); [85-2] (defendant's objections and answers to plaintiff's second set of interrogatories, requests for production, and requests for admission). Defendant objected to the requests on multiple grounds, including that the requests were overbroad, unduly burdensome, and not proportional to the needs of the case. E.g. [85-1] 9, 26. While also insisting that plaintiff's allegations “do[ ] not accurately describe any Federal insurance product,” defendant agreed to produced non-privileged, responsive documents and information that concern only (1) AHC's telemarketing of the ASHIP product, (2) the telemarketing of the ASHIP product by other entities in AHC's “up/down line,”[2] and (3) “applicable processes, policies, and procedures that may be relevant for class certification issues.” [95] 1, 8 & n.6, 9.

*2 In her motion to compel, plaintiff argues that she is entitled to documents and information respecting the telemarketing of all Chubb insurance products by defendant or any third party acting on its behalf, and not just documents and information respecting the marketing of the ASHIP product by AHC and third parties in its up/down line. [85] 2, 6-9. Plaintiff also argues that defendant must produce responsive documents related to alleged TCPA and IDNC violations that occurred from at least January 1, 2017 to the present. [Id.] 2-3, 9. Finally, plaintiff argues that defendant's objections to plaintiff's discovery requests do not comply with Fed. R. Civ. P. 34(b)(2). [Id.] 10-11.

Defendant responds that “[t]he scope of Plaintiff's proposed discovery, particularly in light of the pre-class certification posture of this case, is beyond the bounds of relevancy, overly broad, unduly burdensome, and not proportional to the needs of this case.” [95] 6. Defendant argues that discovery should be limited to the merits of plaintiff's individual claim, and that in any event plaintiff's discovery requests “go well beyond what is relevant to either Plaintiff's individual claims or class certification issues.” [Id.] 8. Defendant also contends that the proposed timeframe for plaintiff's discovery requests is overly broad and will require the burdensome production of irrelevant materials. [Id.] 12-13. Finally, defendant contends that plaintiff did not exhaust her meet-and-confer obligations respecting her Rule 34 objections. [Id.] 5 n.4. Alternatively, defendant maintains that its objections are sufficiently specific and comply with Rule 34(b). [Id.]

“District courts have extremely broad discretion to control discovery.” Marshall v. Grubhub, Inc., Case No. 19 C 3718, 2022 WL 1055484, at *3 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 5, 2022). “In ruling on a motion to compel, the discovery standard set forth in Rule 26(b) applies.” Mendez v. City of Chi., 18-cv-6313, 2020 WL 4736399, at *3 (N.D. Ill. Aug. 14, 2020). Rule 26 “governs the scope of civil discovery and allows parties to obtain discovery regarding any matter that is: (1) nonprivileged; (2) relevant to any party's claim or defense; and (3) proportional to the needs of the case.” Barnes-Staples v. Murphy, Case No. 20-cv-3627, 2021 WL 1426875, at *2 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 15, 2021).

A. Plaintiff's Request for Nation-Wide, Class-Wide Discovery

The Court concludes that defendant's unilateral decision to limit its responsive production to documents and information relating only to plaintiff's individual claims–i.e., those materials concerning AHC's marketing of the ASHIP insurance product–was improper. By limiting its discovery responses in this fashion, defendant is proceeding as if discovery has been bifurcated between plaintiff's individual claims on the one hand and class-wide discovery and issues pertinent to class certification on the other. Yet defendant has not moved to bifurcate discovery, nor has the District Judge ordered that discovery be bifurcated. “[B]ecause discovery was not bifurcated,” plaintiff's class-wide discovery requests were “permissible at this point in the litigation.” Lowe v. CVS Pharm., Inc., No. 14 C 3687, 2015 WL 13427768, at *2 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 6, 2015). The Court further observes that defendant's opposition brief, which is essentially an after-the-fact attempt to justify bifurcated discovery, does not discuss the three factors that a court must consider before deciding whether to bifurcate discovery. See Lucas v. Vee Pak, Inc., No. 12 C 9672, 2014 WL 12932245, at *1 (N.D. Ill. Nov. 13, 2014) (“Courts ordinarily consider three factors in determining if discovery should be bifurcated in class actions: (1) whether bifurcation will assist in making a timely ruling on class certification; (2) the impact that granting or denying the request will have on the pending litigation; and (3) the degree to which class and merits discovery are closely intertwined.”). Given defendant's failure to address these issues in its brief–or to attach any Local Rule 37.2 correspondence demonstrating that the parties have adequately met and conferred on these issues–the Court is in no position to determine whether bifurcated discovery is appropriate (even assuming that the District Judge's referral of this case to the undersigned included the authority to bifurcate discovery).

*3 Although plaintiff's class-wide discovery requests are not categorically impermissible, the Court recognizes that the scope of discovery called for by plaintiff's requests–especially because the proposed classes are defined on a nation-wide basis–appears likely to be time-consuming, expensive, and burdensome.[3] “Discovery is not to be used as a weapon, nor must discovery on the merits be completed precedent to class certification.” Marshall, 2022 WL 1055484, at *4. As other courts have held, “responding to class-wide discovery before the plaintiffs have demonstrated the requirements for class certification frequently presents an undue burden on the responding party.” Deakin v. Magellan Health, Inc., 340 F.R.D. 424, 432 (D.N.M. 2022) (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted). “As applied to class actions,” moreover, Rule 23's proportionality standard “supports the notion that pre-certification discovery should not exceed what is necessary to permit the Court to make an informed decision on class certification.” Miner v. Gov't Payment Serv., Inc., Case No. 14-cv-7474, 2017 WL 3909508, at *4 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 5, 2017); see also Hall v. Western Refining Retail, LLC, Case No. 5:19-cv-855-VAP (SKx), 2020 WL 3891469, at *1 (C.D. Cal. May 4, 2020) (class-wide discovery not permissible unless plaintiff makes prima facie showing that class-certification requirements can be met or that proposed discovery is likely to substantiate class allegations).

The Court is also mindful that “the distinctions between class discovery and merits discovery are not always obvious or easily discernable, and a consideration of the merits, to a certain extent, is inextricably intertwined with the Rule 23 requirements of commonality and typicality, so certification and class-wide merits discovery will likely overlap to some degree.” Deakin, 340 F.R.D. at 432 (internal quotation marks, citation, and brackets omitted). In a case like this one–where plaintiff has not yet moved for class certification–“discovery may be used to help determine whether the class can properly be certified, particularly with respect to the threshold requirements of numerosity, common questions, and adequacy of representation.” Miner, 2017 WL 3909508, at *3 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Infinity Home Collection v. Coleman, No. 17-mc-200-MSK-MEH, 2018 WL 1733262, at *2 (D. Colo. Apr. 10, 2018) (“To be sure, pre-certification discovery should generally pertain to the requirements of Rule 23.”). Pre-certification discovery “must be sufficiently broad to give the plaintiff a realistic opportunity to meet the requirements of class certification, but at the same time, a defendant should be protected from overly burdensome or irrelevant discovery.” Miner, 2017 WL 3909508, at *4.

Considering these principles, the Court denies plaintiff's motion to compel and refuses to issue a blanket ruling that defendant tender class-wide responses to all of plaintiff's discovery requests at this early stage of the litigation. Nor will the Court undertake a request-by-request analysis of the individual discovery requests, given that plaintiff makes no request-specific arguments and seeks only a ruling that defendant is required to engage in class-wide discovery. See [85] 2, 9-10. The District Judge has ordered the parties to file a Rule 26(f) report by January 2, 2023 or within two weeks of the date of a ruling on the pending motion to compel, whichever is sooner. [105]. Before filing that report, the parties are ordered to meet and confer on how to proceed with discovery in this proposed nation-wide class-action case, including (1) whether plaintiff intends to renew her request for class-wide discovery, and (2) whether the parties agree to bifurcate discovery in some fashion or whether defendant will move to bifurcate discovery if an agreement cannot be reached. The parties must then include the results of their conferral in their Rule 26(f) report. Although the Court cannot prejudge the parties’ discussions, the Court believes that the scope of discovery should include, at a minimum, responsive documents and information relating to plaintiff's individual claims and the Rule 23 class certification requirements.[4] Finally, in light of plaintiff's representation that Federal has produced only 459 pages of documents thus far [85] 5, the parties must also discuss a timeframe for Federal's production of the documents that it has already agreed to search for and produce. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 34(b)(2)(B); see also Deakin, 340 F.R.D. at 433 (“Rule 34 plainly requires Defendants to specify the end date by which they will complete their production of documents and ESI responsive to Plaintiffs’ first set of requests for production.”).

B. Documents Relating to Pre-Statute-of-Limitations and Post-Filing Conduct.

*4 This case was filed on April 7, 2021, and the TCPA has a four-year statute of limitations. 28 U.S.C. § 1658. Plaintiff's discovery requests seek documents dating back to either January 1, 2016 (according to her Second Set of Interrogatories and Requests for Production), see [95] 2 n.1, or January 1, 2017, (according to her motion to compel), see [85] 8 n.2.

Defendant objects to producing documents prior to April 7, 2017 on the ground that violations occurring before that date are time-barred. Unfortunately, neither plaintiff's motion to compel nor her reply brief addresses this objection. And while defendant contends that documents and information from before the limitations period should not be discoverable, [95] 12-13, “[e]vidence outside a limitations period is not automatically irrelevant to the claims and defenses in a case.” Human Rights Defense Ctr. v. Jeffreys, No. 18 C 1136, 2022 WL 4386666, at *4 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 22, 2022). Given the scant information before the Court, the Court is unable to decide whether pre-limitations-period discovery is relevant. The motion to compel is accordingly denied, and the parties are instructed to meet and confer on this issue in preparation of the Rule 26(f) report.

The Court also denies the motion as to plaintiff's request for documents and information that postdate the filing of her complaint. Plaintiff seeks this discovery to establish (1) that she is entitled to injunctive relief; (2) whether defendant took action to stop or repudiate the violations, which may be relevant to the issue of ratification; and (3) that defendant's conduct was willful. [85] 8-9. Defendant contends that this discovery will be unduly burdensome and not proportional to the needs of the case, see [95] 13, but this objection assumes that the proper scope of discovery in this case is discovery limited to plaintiff's individual claims. As explained above, however, discovery has not been bifurcated in that fashion, and the parties must meet and confer on that core issue before filing their Rule 26(f) report with the District Judge. Moreover, defendant's position ignores rulings from this District that “[i]t is commonsense that information and documents created after filing the Complaint can be relevant and must be produced.” Charvat v. Valente, 82 F. Supp. 3d 713, 717 (N.D. Ill. 2015) (ordering defendant to produce post-filing document discovery in TCPA case). That may be especially true for plaintiff's request for ratification-type evidence, which can prove liability in a TCPA case. See Brown v. DirecTV, LLC, 562 F. Supp. 3d 590, 609-11 (C.D. Cal. 2021) (awarding partial summary judgment to plaintiffs in TCPA case where evidence showed that defendant ratified actions by vendor that violated TCPA). The parties must meet and confer on this issue before filing their Rule 26(f) report.

The Court observes that plaintiff's request for post-filing discovery relates in significant part to damages. As other courts within the Seventh Circuit have recognized, “at this stage of the litigation before a class is certified, it is not proportional discovery to require [defendant] to produce information and documents solely grounded ... in determining the extent of class damages.” Drake v. Mirand Response Sys., Inc., No. 1:19-cv-1458-RLY-DML, 2020 WL 4004058, at *6 (S.D. Ind. Jul. 15, 2020). “The proportionality standard under Rule 26(b)(1) can effectively limit pre-certification damages discovery to issues relevant to liability and whether the Plaintiffs’ proposed class meets Rule 23's requirements.” Simpkins v. Alcoa USA Corp., No. 3:20-cv-278-RLY-MPB, 2021 WL 5029542, at *3 (S.D. Ind. Sept. 22, 2021). Because plaintiffs pursuing class actions must show that damages are capable of being measured on a class-wide basis, see Wacker Drive Exec. Suites, LLC v. Jones Lang LaSalle Americas (Illinois), LP, Case No. 18 C 5492, 2022 WL 1045701, at *20 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 2022), it may be that some damages-based discovery is appropriate. But given the cursory arguments in the parties’ briefs and the lack of any Rule 37.2 correspondence indicating how the parties’ negotiations on this issue played out, the Court is unable to issue a definitive ruling respecting plaintiff's discovery request. The Court therefore denies the motion to compel as to post-filing discovery and orders the parties to meet and confer on this issue in preparing their Rule 26(f) report.

C. Defendants’ Compliance with Rule 34(b)(2)

*5 Finally, the Court concludes that plaintiff did not exhaust her meet-and-confer obligations respecting Federal's alleged non-compliance with Rule 34(b)(2). Plaintiff argues that defendant's responses are insufficient because they “assert that the response is made ‘subject to and without waiving’ Chubb's individual and General Objections, and more critically, they don't say what responsive materials Chubb is not producing[.]” [85] 11 (italics in original). However, plaintiff filed the motion to compel before conferring with the defense about these objections. As defendant explains, plaintiff requested a meet-and-confer on defendant's First and Second Supplemental and Amended Discovery Answers on August 31, 2022. [95] 5 n.4. Defense counsel responded that they could not confer until September 13 because of travel and other scheduling conflicts. [Id.]. But plaintiff filed the motion to compel on September 8 without conducting the meet-and-confer. [Id.]. Because plaintiff did not exhaust her meet-and-confer obligations on this issue, it is not ripe for judicial resolution. The motion to compel is therefore denied.

For the reasons set forth above, plaintiff's motion to compel [85] is denied. Because the Court does not believe that oral argument would materially assist the Court in its resolution of the issues raised by plaintiff's motion, defendant's request for oral argument is denied. Before filing the Rule 26(f) report with the District Judge, the parties must meet and confer on the scope of discovery in this case, including the specific issues identified in this Order, and include the results of their conferral in the Rule 26(f) report.