A surefire way to get into trouble with producing electronically stored information (ESI) is for the producing party to go radio silent. The requesting party gets understandably upset if there is supposed to be a search term hit report and instead there is the sound of silence.
In Carambot v. N.Y.C. Health, there is a long list of discovery going sideways. The key issues included the producing party agreeing to produce a search term hit report, months of no action, claimed problems with whatever search application was used, and upcoming close of discovery deadlines. Carambot v. N.Y.C. Health, No. 24-CV-841 (JPO) (BCM), 2026 LX 88524 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 26, 2026).
The Defendants explained they ran narrowed search terms (2.5 months after the agreed upon deadline), which identified 29,000 document families. The Defendants stated those hits needed to be processed in order to generate a hit report. There was no set date for producing either the hit report or responsive ESI. Carambot, at *2.
The Plaintiffs [understandably] argued that any “technical complications” did not excuse the Defendants’ silence for collection and producing ESI. Id.
The Court ordered the following to remedy the discovery impasse:
The attorneys to meet and confer either in person, phone, or video conference for a minimum of 45 minutes to resolve the discovery issues in good-faith by March 5, 2026.
If the attorneys could not agree on the date for a meet and confer, they were ordered to appear in court for a supervised meet and confer on March 4, 2026 at 400 pm.
The Court ordered the parties to comply with the good faith requirements to meet and confer with the opposing parties.
Carambot, at *3-4.
The Court set new discovery dates and corresponding pretrial hearings to resolve the concerns created by need for documents to be produced and depositions scheduled.
Bow Tie Thoughts
There are many creative ways to get in trouble with a judge. Telling the judge you are busy with many other cases is in the “high risk” category. It is very understandable that this judge set a day and time for a supervised meet and confer over discovery as an incentive for the parties to meet and confer on their own.
The producing party did not identify the eDiscovery applications they were using for both collection and searches. The context of the arguments sound like the producing party had not collected the data until well into the litigation. If that was the situation, the workflow highlights there is search for collecting ESI and additional searches in a review application.
Complex eDiscovery problems age like milk, not wine. The ideal approach is preserving ESI after a party has a duty to preserve. That might have happened in this case and supplemental culling was necessary before exporting to a review application. The record is not clear. There is a claim that the requesting party’s search terms caused the producing party’s eDiscovery application to crash. It is not stated if the application was for collection or review. Whatever happened, going silent is never a good plan.