ANA CHAN ET AL VS. FORD MOTOR COMPANY ET AL

Matter on calendar for Tuesday, July 1, 2025, Line 6, PLAINTIFF ANA CHAN, STEVEN CHONG-SUE's Motion To Compel Further Responses To Plaintiffs' Request For Production Of Documents, Set One. (Part 1 of 2).

Plaintiff Ana Chan's Motion To Compel Further Responses To Plaintiffs' Request For Production Of Documents, Set One is DENIED.

The motion is denied because the record demonstrates a failure by Moving Party to engage in meaningful meet and confer. (See Code of Civil Procedure section 2016.040.) The record before the court does not show Moving Party made a reasonable and good faith attempt at an informal resolution of each issue presented by the motion. Notably, to propose as a resolution compliance with discovery addenda that include 60-day production timelines then move to compel strict compliance with the original discovery requests well before the 60-day period runs is not reasonable and good faith attempt at an informal resolution of the issues.

The motion is denied on the separate and independent grounds that Moving Party failed to file a separate statement that satisfies the requirements set out in California Rules of Court, Rule 3.1345. "Any motion involving the content of a discovery request or the responses to such a request must be accompanied by a separate statement." (Cal. Rules of Court, rule 3.1345(a); see People v. Sarpas (2014) 225 Cal.App.4th 1539, 1554 [trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying motions to compel in part because movants failed to comply with the applicable rules regarding separate statements]; Mills v.

U.S. Bank (2008) 166 Cal.App.4th 871, 893, [failure to include separate statement required by Cal. Rules of Court provided justification of court's denial of discovery motion].) "A separate statement is a separate document filed and served with the discovery motion that provides all the information necessary to understand each discovery request and all the responses to it that are at issue. The separate statement must be full and complete so that no person is required to review any other document in order to determine the full request and the full response.

Material must not be incorporated into the separate statement by reference." (Cal. Rules of Court, rule 3.1345(c).) Subdivision (c) goes on to set forth the required elements for a compliant separate statement.

Plaintiff's separate statement here falls far short. For example, her separate statement contains significant text that appears to be boiler plate-at a minimum, much of the text has no bearing on this discovery dispute. Further, the separate statement contains no information regarding the February-March meet and confer, the discovery addenda and the parties related responses. Such information is clearly material to Plaintiff's demands in this motion. In sum, the separate statement did not at all help the court understand and adjudicate the disputes.

Plaintiff and her counsel are advised that discovery motions by their nature are fact intensive and a party must discuss the actual facts of the case in a reliable manner in their MPA in support of the motion. The instant motion is not fact specific. After reading Plaintiff's MPA on this motion, for example, the court was left to speculate about the nature, let alone specifics, of the claimed defects. Nor is the factual discussion provided reliable Plaintiff's account of the meet and confer at pages 4 and 5, for example, is fundamentally at odds the meet-and-confer correspondence in the record. (Continued to Part 2) =(302/JMQ). | |