*1 At the parties' request, the Court held an informal discovery conference on April 30, 2024. (Dkt. No. 49). The Court, having considered the parties' submissions and the arguments at the hearing, now issues the following order:

At issue are Plaintiff's Requests for Production (“RFP”) Nos. 6 and 7, which seek all documents related to any complaints, claims, lawsuits, disputes, or reports involving a specific model of Defendant's dishwasher product, as well as when property damage was caused or alleged to have been caused due to a failure of a braided stainless steel supply line in the dishwasher. In response to these Requests, Defendant agreed to produce incident data (including claims, complaints, and water events) on dishwashers in the same series – the series 5000— as the model at issue in this litigation – the 5605 model— from 2021 to the present, but not on other Defendant model dishwashers. At the hearing, defense counsel informed the Court that after 2020, Defendant switched to a different platform to record incidents that occurred to its dishwashers, and that a more widespread search for incident data on other dishwasher series would be very time-consuming and not feasible. Plaintiff argued that it was entitled to incident data prior to 2021 for all dishwashers that had the braided stainless steel supply line and/or shut-off valve at issue in the 5605 model.

The Court finds that Defendant did not sufficiently articulate why it was unable to search for incident data prior to 2021, nor did it adequately explain why the RFPs should be limited to the 5000 series, especially given that the supply line and/or shut-off valve at issue was not exclusive to the 5000 series and that the 5000 series represents the fifth generation of essentially the same dishwasher model in previous series. The Court limits the time frame for both Requests to all models with these features for the past ten years. To the extent there are objections regarding attorney-client privilege, work product doctrine, or other privilege issues, Defendant is ordered to produce a privilege log listing the documents that are being withheld, the parties to the communication, and a description of the documents with sufficient specificity to permit Plaintiff to challenge the assertion.

Accordingly, Plaintiff's request for an order compelling Defendant to produce documents responsive to RFP Nos. 6-7 is GRANTED. Defendant is ordered to produce these documents within 15 days from the date of this Order, given that parties' fact discovery deadline was April 26, 2024.

The parties must utilize the Court's informal discovery dispute resolution process to bring any compliance issues with this Order to the Court's attention. (See Judge Sagar's Procedures).

IT IS SO ORDERED.