Judge Seeks Google Antitrust Discovery Dispute Resolutions
A judge sought to push along discovery in DOJ and states' antitrust case against Google. At a livestreamed status conference Tuesday, Judge Amit Mehta of U.S. District Court in Washington directed parties to file a joint statement by 2 p.m.…
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Friday on where things stand on parties’ disagreement over the scope of a DOJ deposition notice about market share. Google attorney John Schmidtlein and DOJ Civil Division trial attorney Kenneth Dintzer said they’re meeting Wednesday. Mehta ordered Google to provide “dates certain” by close-of-business Friday for a deposition witness to appear on states’ request about how Google analyzes session logs showing consumers’ journey through the search engine. Mehta also sought updates by then on Google disputes with Yelp and Microsoft about the scope of Google’s document requests. Google complained Microsoft production remains sluggish, in a Tuesday filing. Microsoft objected to using “Bing” and other Google-requested search strings for the document production. Mehta said they don’t “strike me as out of bounds.” He urged Google to look harder at adjusting proximity connectors, which measure how closely words appear in a document, as a possible way to reduce burdens on Microsoft. Parties should reach agreement on technology-assisted review to increase efficiencies, he said. Mehta wants to see Microsoft’s pace increase through September, with a goal of finishing by mid-October. The judge last month set Sept. 30 for Apple to produce about 1.5 million documents DOJ requested (see 2108190041). Mehta said he won’t order Google to turn over to DOJ certain information, including privileged logs and materials produced for past investigations. The jurist said the request was too broad and maybe not entirely relevant. Mehta resolved another disagreement over sharing Google documents about employees’ self-assessments and performance reviews. DOJ asked the court to reject Google’s request to limit distribution of such documents to eight people because it didn’t account for IT professionals, experts and others. Mehta said such tight protections could apply to entire documents, but snippets relevant to deposition could be more widely shared. The next three status hearings are Sept. 28 at 11 a.m., Oct. 29 at 3 p.m. and Nov. 30 at 11 a.m., Mehta said.