Basketball Club Given 14 Days To Produce Hundreds of Thousands of Email Messages

Posted by Gregg Mayer on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008   

In an ongoing lawsuit in Seattle involving the Supersonics (“Sonics”), a court ruled that the Professional Basketball Club, owners of the Sonics, must produce thousands of email messages from six of its members within 14 days of the February 25, 2008 court order.

The lawsuit, City of Seattle v. Professional Basketball Club, LLC. (“PBC”), involves a dispute over the Seattle Coliseum lease agreement between the city and the club. The city wants improvements made to the Coliseum.

As part of the lawsuit, the PBC turned over approximately 150,000 email messages from two members of the club. The city sought email messages for another six members. PBC objected, arguing the search for those email messages would “increase the email universe exponentially” and produce irrelevant and duplicated messages.

After concluding from a preliminary analysis that the six PBC members were “managers” of the club, the court determined that the email messages were relevant and should be disclosed. The court rejected PBC’s argument:

PBC argues that the emails at issue are irrelevant because the case is centrally about whether the City can compel PBC to specific performance under the terms of the Lease. PBC argues that the substance of the emails – information regarding the formation of PBC and the Sonics’ finances – is irrelevant or duplicative of discovery PBC already produced. But…managers of PBC are agents of the PBC. Thus, communication within PBC, as well as communication by PBC members with third parties, may be relevant to the underlying issues.

As a result, the email must be disclosed. The court was not convinced that producing the email messages – which presumably run into the hundreds of thousands of messages since just two members resulted in 150,000 email messages – would be “unnecessarily burdensome.”

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.