United States Ex Rel. Landis v. Tailwind Sports Corp.

Facts

P served its Third Set of Interrogatories on D on July 15, 2015. On November 30, 2015, the Court granted P's motion to compel D to supplement his responses to Interrogatories 15 through 22. D has since supplemented these responses two additional times, recently serving his Third Supplemental Responses on P. P remains dissatisfied with four of his answers and has moved to compel 'complete responses' to Interrogatories 16 through 19. D is required to describe the monetary benefits that D contends accrued to the United States as a result of the U.S. Postal Service's sponsorship of D's cycling team. P claims that it cannot adequately oppose D's pending motion for summary judgment which seeks to establish that the USPS ultimately profited from the sponsorship without full responses to the following four interrogatories:

  Interrogatory No. 16: Identify the value of any earned media or ad equivalency you contend the USPS received in connection with the sponsorship.

  Interrogatory No. 17: Identify the value of any improvement in employee morale you contend the USPS received in connection with the sponsorship.

  Interrogatory No. 18: Identify the date, amount, and customer for any sale by USPS that you contend resulted from the sponsorship, and explain how the sponsorship [**4] contributed to the sale.

  Interrogatory No. 19: If you contend that public perception of the USPS brand improved as a result of the sponsorship, identify all facts supporting your contention and state the value of any such improvement in public perception.

D has pointed P to specified page ranges of the report of one of D's experts, Doug Kidder. In response to each of the interrogatories D states to P that 'the answer to this interrogatory may be determined by examining Mr. Kidder's expert report, Mr. Kidder's reply report, Mr. [Erich] Joachimsthaler's [expert] report, and all documents cited and referenced therein.' D responds to each interrogatory: 'Information responsive to this request may also be located in previously-produced documents, including as set forth in Attachment A, and the burden of deriving or ascertaining the answer will be substantially the same for P as it is D.' Attachment A contains identifying information for over two hundred deposition transcripts and for hundreds of other documents produced by P in discovery. P contests D's implicit effort to invoke Rule 33(d) which allows a party served with interrogatories to forgo a comprehensive narrative response in certain circumstances. 'If the answer to an interrogatory may be determined by examining, auditing, compiling, abstracting, or summarizing a party's business records,' and 'if the burden of deriving or ascertaining the answer will be substantially the same for either party,' then the responding party need only 'specify the records that must be reviewed' and give the interrogating party a 'reasonable opportunity' to review them. Fed. R. Civ. P. 33(d)(1)-(2). The responding party must also identify the records to be reviewed 'in sufficient detail to enable the interrogating party to locate and identify them as readily as the responding party could.'

Issues

Rule of Law

Holding and Decision

Legal Analysis

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