Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-cand-3_16-cv-02276/USCOURTS-cand-3_16-cv-02276-11/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 442
Nature of Suit: Civil Rights Employment
Cause of Action: 29:621 Job Discrimination (Age)

---

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

United States District Court

Northern District of California

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA

STEVE RABIN, et al.,

Plaintiffs,

v.

PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS LLP,

Defendant.

Case No.16-cv-02276-JST 

DISCOVERY ORDER

Re: ECF No. 96

I. BACKGROUND

On April 4, 2016, the parties submitted a joint discovery brief, ECF No. 96, in which they 

dispute Plaintiffs’ request to PricewaterhouseCoopers (“PwC”) for data to support their statistical 

analysis. Plaintiffs ask the Court to “either (1) order PwC to produce the Source11database in 

full, or (2) defer ruling until the parties have addressed [] back-end options” for accessing the 

Source1 data. ECF No. 97-4 at 1. PwC objects that Plaintiffs’ data request “calls overwhelmingly 

for irrelevant information that is disproportionate to the needs of the case.” Id. at 6. PwC asserts 

that it remains willing to “proceed with assembling the list of potential class members and the 

agreed-upon data fields for those individuals and their comparators, once Plaintiffs provide a 

reasonable age proxy;” the process PwC claims the parties already agreed to in December 2016. 

Id. at 11. 

II. DISCUSSION

Consistent with its usual practice – particularly in discovery disputes – and as the Court 

has previously indicated to the parties, the Court here attempts to resolve the dispute by adopting 

 

1

Source1 is “PwC’s main system of record for applicant processing.” ECF No. 97-4 at 1. 

Case 3:16-cv-02276-JST Document 105 Filed 04/19/17 Page 1 of 4
2

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

United States District Court

Northern District of California

one of the parties’ positions2: either that PwC produce the Source1 database in its entirety, as 

Plaintiffs request, or continue under the “two stage” data production process they agreed to in late 

2016, as PwC requests. The Court will adopt PwC’s proposal. 

The Court starts by acknowledging that statistical evidence is “unquestionably relevant” in 

employment discrimination cases. Diaz v. Am. Tel. & Tel., 752 F.2d 1356, 1362–63 (9th Cir. 

1985). That includes cases brought under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (“ADEA”). 

See, e.g., Pines v. State Farm Gen. Ins. Co., No. SACV89-631, 1992 WL 92398, at *4 (C.D. Cal. 

Feb. 25, 1992). What is disputed here is the scope of that discovery before conditional 

certification of a collective action. 

Simply put, Plaintiffs’ position is not reasonable. Plaintiffs identify no case in which the 

court ordered production of a defendant’s entire employment database,

3 much less a database 

containing “more than two million applications,” as PwC’s Source1 database does. ECF No. 97-4 

at 6. Plaintiffs do not argue that even half of these applications have any relevance to Plaintiffs’ 

claims. Even accepting for the sake of argument Plaintiffs’ characterization of the burden to 

produce this information as low, Plaintiffs’ request is not justified because the majority of the 

 

2

If the parties submit competing [proposals], the Court will endeavor to choose, in 

all respects, the single proposal it concludes is most reasonable. See Michael 

Carrell & Richard Bales, Considering Final Offer Arbitration to Resolve Public 

Sector Impasses in Times of Concession Bargaining, 28 Ohio St. J. on Disp. Resol. 

1, 20 (2013) (“In baseball arbitration . . . the parties . . . have every incentive to 

make a reasonable proposal to the arbitrator because the arbitrator will choose the 

more reasonable offer”).

Sage Electrochromics, Inc. v. View, Inc., No. 12-CV-6441-JST, 2014 WL 1379282, at *3 (N.D. 

Cal. Apr. 8, 2014) (ellipses in original). 

3

Plaintiffs do find support for considering statistical analyses in pre-collective certification 

employment cases, but none of those cases analyzed the scope of the statistical analyses or 

underlying data. For example, the court in Krueger v. N.Y. Tel. Co., 163 F.R.D. 433, 439 

(S.D.N.Y. 1995) noted that plaintiffs’ expert “performed an analysis of the effect of the [the 

challenged policy] on [defendant’s] management employees.” There is no discussion of the data 

underlying the expert’s report. At the very least, the fact that the study was limited to 

“management employees” suggests that the Krueger plaintiffs did not demand data discovery on 

the scale Plaintiffs seek here. Hyman v. First Union Corp., 982 F. Supp. 1, 4 (D.D.C. 1997) is 

similarly unhelpful. Although the plaintiffs in that case “presented statistical evidence that they 

believe supports a finding of institution-wide discrimination,” the court did not rely on that 

evidence, which was contested, “[b]ecause of the other evidence which provides a basis for the 

decision to allow a collective action to proceed.” Id. 

Case 3:16-cv-02276-JST Document 105 Filed 04/19/17 Page 2 of 4
3

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

United States District Court

Northern District of California

discovery demanded is irrelevant. The one case Plaintiffs cite in support of their raw data request, 

Chen-Oster v. Goldman, Sachs & Co., 285 F.R.D. 294, 305 (S.D.N.Y. 2012), does not support 

their argument. In that case, the court acknowledged that there is no “legal impediment” to 

requiring production of a defendant’s entire database, but ultimately refused to order the defendant 

to do so due to “the costs involved in converting the mass of unorganized data provided into 

useable information.” Id.

Defendant’s alternative is the more reasonable one. Defendant seeks to limit precertification data discovery to the agreement the parties reached through a series of emails in 

December 2016. The parties created the following two-stage process:

In the first, PwC would provide a list of the basic elements of the system, such as 

all fields contained in the system. In the second stage, PwC would provide, for 

applicants for Associate, Experienced Associate, or Senior Associate positions in 

the Tax and Assurance business lines, the following data: names, contact 

information, age proxy, job position and organizational location information, and 

application outcome.

ECF No. 96-7 at 4 (internal citations and quotation marks omitted). Plaintiffs appear to have 

agreed to this process. ECF No. 96-8 at 2 (“[T]he two-step process you describe appears to be 

exactly what we envision.”).4 Although the data generated by this process may not be robust 

enough for a merits-stage statistical analysis, it is sufficient to support a motion to conditionally 

certify a collective action. And of the two options presented to the Court, it is by far the more 

reasonable.

/ / /

/ / /

/ / /

/ / /

/ / /

 

4

Plaintiffs’ argument that data discovery should not be limited to the tax and assurance lines of 

business is not persuasive. Although Plaintiffs’ class definition is not limited to those two 

business lines, that is where the named Plaintiffs applied for jobs, and previous discovery has 

included that limitation. E.g., ECF No. 59 at 3 (“The Court orders Defendants to produce all agerelated complaints by individuals seeking employment in any of the relevant lines of business, 

whether or not those individuals are part of the putative class.”)

Case 3:16-cv-02276-JST Document 105 Filed 04/19/17 Page 3 of 4
4

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

United States District Court

Northern District of California

III. CONCLUSION

The Court orders the parties to proceed under the two-stage data discovery plan outlined 

above.5 

IT IS SO ORDERED.

Dated: April 19, 2017

______________________________________

JON S. TIGAR

United States District Judge

 

5

The Court takes no position on whether additional data discovery would be warranted after a 

ruling on Plaintiffs’ anticipated motion for certification of their collective action.

Case 3:16-cv-02276-JST Document 105 Filed 04/19/17 Page 4 of 4