Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Wabash National Corporation

Summary

The court addresses the EEOC’s motion for a protective order concerning subpoenas issued to nonparties in an employment-discrimination action involving pregnancy-related workplace accommodations. The court grants the motion as to a request concerning money or other damages and limits the remaining discovery to responsive written communications with the charging party, Hayley Knight, while excluding communications among nonparties or with other unnamed parties and communications predating her employment. The court otherwise denies the motion and orders production within 30 days.

Holdings

1. The EEOC had standing under Rule 26(c) to move for a protective order on behalf of the nonparties, even though its independent standing to quash the subpoenas under Rule 45 might be disputed.
2. Request Number Eight was prohibited because it sought information concerning money or other damages sought by Knight and Wabash had not overcome the presumption against discovery into a plaintiff's financial motive for filing suit.
3. The subpoena instructions were unclear, improper, overreaching, and unduly burdensome, and the permissible discovery had to be limited to responsive written communications with Hayley Knight.
4. The remaining discovery was limited to responsive written communications with Hayley Knight and could not include communications solely among the nonparties or between nonparties and other unnamed persons. It also could not include communications predating Knight's employment at Wabash.
5. Communications exclusively between Knight's married parents were presumptively protected by the federal marital-communications privilege, but because the discovery was narrowed to communications with Hayley Knight, the parents were not required to produce a privilege log.

Questions Presented

1. Whether the EEOC had standing under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c) to seek a protective order concerning subpoenas served on nonparties.
2. Whether Wabash's subpoena requests were relevant, proportional, and sufficiently specific, or instead were overbroad and unduly burdensome.
3. Whether the subpoena requests should be limited because they implicated privacy or marital-communications privilege concerns.
4. What scope of nonparty discovery was appropriate in light of the demonstrated need to verify the completeness of Knight's electronically stored information.

Disposition

other