This is the second in a series of posts summarizing the 6 most important eDiscovery cases in Delaware in 2015.

Flax v. Pet360, Inc., C.A. No. 10123-VCL, Oral Argument on Plaintiff’s Second Motion for Sanctions and Rulings of the Court, June 29, 2015.

In this hearing arising from a fiduciary duty action against the directors of Pet360 in connection with Pet360’s merger with PetSmart, Vice Chancellor Laster addressed the plaintiff’s second motion for sanctions regarding defendants’ alleged “repeated ongoing discovery abuses.”

Although the Court acknowledged that generally there has been an increase in discovery aggressiveness both nationally and in Delaware and that courts have to be more firm in addressing these problems, it reminded the parties that consequences for discovery abuses still have to be geared toward specific issues.  Here, the plaintiff largely failed to present such issues with sufficient specificity and the Court was otherwise unwilling to make a broad pronouncement to “[s]top discovery gamesmanship.”

The one notable exception, however, was the Court’s order that no defendant shall redact any information from a document on the basis of relevance.  The Court explained that “relevance redactions are terribly dubious in the first place,” and, given the ample confidentiality order in the case, “that form of redaction is too dangerous to make it worthwhile.”