CIT Rules DOJ's Discovery Responses to Glock Were Mostly Insufficient

Court of International Trade Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves ruled Oct. 4 that the government hadn’t sufficiently responded to discovery requests by pistolmaker Glock, overruling a number of DOJ's objections and criticizing it for missing its interrogatory responses deadline.

And, after a search of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and Court of International Trade precedent turned up nothing, she also held in the opinion that publicly accessible documents are still discoverable under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Glock filed a motion in June seeking to compel better government responses to its discovery requests (see 2406240062); the U.S. objected to every single one of its requests for admission, interrogatories and requests for production (see 2406240062), and the answers it did provide, the importer claimed, were “replete with evasive commentary” and “fail[ed] to provide substantive information.”

Overall, Choe-Groves ordered DOJ to respond to one of Glock’s requests for admission, 13 of the importer’s interrogatories and six of its requests for document production. She refused to award attorneys’ fees to Glock, ordering each party to bear its own costs.

Requests for Production

DOJ objected to most of Glock’s production requests because it claimed the records sought were already publicly available.

In some federal courts, parties are still required to produce records in their possession even if they’re already accessible to the opposing party; in others, they’re not, Choe-Groves said.

She said she hadn’t been able to find any precedent indicating which direction CIT leans in a review of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and CIT cases. So she made the ruling herself, ordering that publicly accessible records are still discoverable.

“The language of USCIT Rule 34 is expansive ... [and] does not exclude information that might be easily available from a public source,” she said. “As information becomes more accessible through the internet and other technologies, imposing such an exclusion would inevitably result in unnecessary complications for litigants.”

Although she discarded that objection, she agreed with the government that many of Glock’s production requests were overbroad because they didn't set date or subject ranges. She sustained objections to 18 of Glock’s document requests, but ordered the government to respond to the six remaining.

Interrogatories

DOJ objected to all of the interrogatories Glock served on it, Choe-Groves said. The importer also argued that the responses DOJ had provided regardless of its objections were insufficient.

First, the judge noted that the government had been more than a month late in its answers to the interrogatories. As a result, though she could still choose to not compel further responses to interrogatories she deemed improper, any objections the government raised were waived unless it could show good cause.

The government hadn’t provided good cause and had thus waived its objections, she found.

Forbidding parties to raise objections “is a severe sanction and should only be imposed to remedy bad conduct or intentional efforts to impair the proceedings,” she said. She found that the government’s actions had met that bar. DOJ, she said, hadn’t sought an extension of its response deadline until after that deadline had passed, “suggesting carelessness and a lack of appropriate due diligence,” and hadn't offered any explanation for its lateness.

The government also argued that it had responded adequately to each interrogatory, regardless of its objections. Choe-Groves disagreed.

Interrogatory answers must each be responsive and stand on their own; they can’t refer to any other interrogatories, documents, pleadings or depositions, she said. So four interrogatory responses that directed Glock to a headquarters ruling were not sufficient, she said.

She also took issue with the government’s answers to four interrogatories that simply said the U.S. would “amend or supplement its response” if more information became available.

“Though USCIT Rule 33(a)(2) permits a party to delay answering an interrogatory until after designated discovery, doing so requires approval from the Court,” she said. “The Court has not granted such approval in this case and Defendant has made no showing as to why it would be appropriate.”

The judge did find that three interrogatories incorrectly inquired about purely legal matters and one was overbroad, declining to compel responses to them. She ordered the government to answer the remaining 13.

Requests to Admit

And finally, though she ultimately upheld one objection that applied to most of Glock’s requests for admission -- as she agreed that all but two concerned purely legal matters -- Choe-Groves discussed and dismissed most of the other concurrent objections the government tried to raise.

The judge discarded objections that the requests relied on “undefined or vague terms” -- including a few that described the terms “product,” “selling expense” or “production costs” as too ambiguous.

The U.S. argued that the terms “accounting rules, standards, and procedures” were too vague, but Glock defined them in the same requests they appeared in, she noted. It further objected to the phrases “Glock’s allocation methodology” and “Glock’s cost accounting methodology” even though their definitions could have either been derived from context or clarified by Glock, she said.

And “the remaining objections are to words and phrases commonly used in the context of trade or the everyday parlance of an average person,” she pointed out -- such as “product,” “selling expense” and “production costs.”

None of these were vague enough to have prevented the government from responding, she said.

Next, she turned to discuss hypotheticals -- requests to admit, for example, that “the amount of a royalty payment that is based on a percentage of net sales of a product(s) cannot be known until after the product(s) is sold.” Again, she dismissed them, refuting the government’s argument that requests for admission may only seek facts, not opinions.

“None of these requests pose improper hypothetical scenarios, but, rather, seek Defendant’s opinions regarding the application of the law to alleged facts,” which is allowable under the law, she said.

(Glock, Inc. v. U.S., Slip Op. 24-106, CIT # 23-00046, dated 10/04/2024; Judge: Jennifer Choe-Groves; Attorneys: John F. Renzulli of Renzulli Law Firm for plaintiff Glock; Justin R. Miller for defendant U.S. government)