A Florida judge denied National Fish and Seafood’s subpoenas for Tampa Bay Fisheries information in the ongoing trade secrets case.
NFS’s requests for information from Tampa Bay were ruled “overly broad” and “improper” by Julie S. Sneed, magistrate judge for the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Tampa Bay said in a letter to Magistrate Judge M. Page Kelley for the U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts in Boston, who is overseeing the trade secrets dispute.
In October, NFS subpoenaed DataComm, Tampa Bay’s IT contractor, and DataComm’s employee, Justin Stabenow, but Sneed granted Tampa Bay’s motion to quash the subpoena directed to Stabenow, and granted almost entirely the motion to quash the subpoena directed to DataComm, Tampa Bay said in the letter.
The Florida court also rejected NFS’s remaining requests as “overly broad,” “of limited relevance,” and calculated to “capture a range of documents that have little to do with this case,” Tampa Bay said.
“The requests for all documents and communications between DataComm and Tampa Bay Fisheries for the period since 1 June, 2018, lack proportionality and arguably capture a range of documents that have little to do with this case,” Sneed wrote.
DataComm’s role consisted of properly quarantining e-mails from Tampa Bay’s servers based on pending litigation, Sneed added.
“Only three e-mails are missing from Tampa Bay Fisheries’ production of 126 pages of e-mails with Scanlon. The absence of these three e-mails, standing alone, is tangential to the parties’ claims and defenses and does not warrant intrusive discovery into Tampa Bay Fisheries’ third-party IT vendor.”
The Florida court rejected “NFS’ attempt to obtain the PST file, the archive of e-mails that Tampa Bay placed under a legal hold, as “improper."
"NFS is not entitled to circumvent appropriate legal objections by subpoenaing the entirety of the legal hold e-mail archive from Tampa Bay Fisheries’ outside contractor, DataComm,” Sneed wrote.
“We hope that the Florida Court’s persuasive opinion helps the Court to: (1) likewise deny NFS’ request for the PST file; (2) find moot the request for service tickets and deny any request for additional service tickets; and (3) likewise deny further intrusive and unwarranted discovery on the basis of the three emails,” Tampa Bay wrote.
Plus, in documents filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts in late January, Tampa Bay said NFS needs to identify the trade secrets that it alleges Tampa Bay obtained.
NFS has “produced no responsive documents, no substantive interrogatory responses, and no identification of the alleged trade secrets taken by Tampa Bay,” Tampa Bay said in the court filing.
A hearing on the documents NFS wants Tampa Bay to turn over is set for late February, while the case is scheduled to go to trial in July.
