The Parties Engaged in Substantial Discovery Clause Samples

The Parties Engaged in Substantial Discovery. Plaintiffs conducted an extensive pre-filing investigation and, after the commencement of the Action, both parties conducted broad, extensive, and thorough discovery related to class and collective action certification between 2010 and April 2013. Plaintiffs conducted extensive data analysis of more than 173 Terabytes of personnel and compensation-related data as well as discovery regarding key policies and practices including, without limitation, account distributions, teaming, leads and referrals, and compensation. The written class and collective action certification discovery conducted in this case included four formal sets of document requests (totaling more than 50 distinct categories of documents, and more than 200 separate requests) propounded by Plaintiffs, innumerable discovery-related letters and informal requests, and interrogatories. Defendants propounded requests for production and interrogatories toward each of the five Named Plaintiffs, and three sets of requests for admissions. Between the parties, more than 900,000 pages (and over 100,000 documents) of materials were exchanged and reviewed (Defendants produced over 100,000 documents consisting of nearly 890,000 pages of material for Plaintiffs to review) against the backdrop of extensive negotiations over the scope of discovery, including ESI (such as email) discovery. The production included documents over many years and across the Defendants related to the challenged policies and practices in this Action (including, without limitation, policies and practices relating to compensation, account distributions, teaming and pooling, and leads and referrals), emails, internal complaints, audits, documents related to the Plaintiffs, and other materials. The parties also litigated discovery disputes, including over whether Defendants were required to turn over their human resources, compensation, and account data and, if so, the scope of the production. Following briefing and two rounds of oral arguments, resulting in a telephonic Order on March 4, 2011, requiring the production of data, Defendants began producing data. Due to the complexity of the data, among other reasons, numerous supplemental productions occurred, with the last production in April 2013. Based on extensive work with their data experts, Plaintiffs conducted three formal data depositions and numerous informal interviews of Defendants’ employees to understand the data, and issued numerous informal written questions to Defense co...