Risk of Reciprocal Scorched Earth Discovery Justifies Deposition Limits

The court granted in part defendant's motion for protective order regarding the deposition of party witnesses but imposed limits on the number (8 per side) and duration (7 hours) of non-expert party depositions. "If the Court permitted all of the discovery contemplated, the costs could be enormous and might effectively prevent one or both parties from pursuing the merits. . . . [T]he Court cannot precisely say how much the non-expert discovery might cost. But if both sides engaged in reciprocal scorched-earth discovery, the Court envisions fact deposition expenses alone in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars for each side. Add written and document discovery, discovery from third parties, and expert discovery, and the discovery expenses could easily mushroom into the millions of dollars. The parties, individually and together, have not convinced the Court that the likely benefit of this discovery outweighs the expense."

Enplas Display Device Corporation et al v. Seoul Semiconductor Co., Ltd., 3-13-cv-05038 (CAND June 9, 2014, Order) (Cousins, M.J.)