Opinion ID: 77297
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Satellite Information

Text: 56 The district court also held GM in civil contempt for the failure by GM to obey the August 27, 2004, order to produce documents relating to all satellite dealerships. GM contends that the district court abused its discretion because (1) GM performed reasonable searches in response to the order by the district court, (2) the order was not sufficiently clear to support a finding of contempt, and (3) the finding was based in part on clearly erroneous factual findings. After a thorough review of the record, we reject the arguments made by GM and conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion when it held GM in civil contempt for its failure to produce the satellite information as ordered on August 27, 2004, and February 3, 2005. 57 On August 27, 2004, the district court clearly ordered GM to produce all documents [c]reating, evidencing, terminating, implementing, continuing the satellite program. The court was unambiguous: If it has to do with the satellite program, and it's a document, then you need to produce it. When GM suggested that the order required GM to contact[ ] the hundred and fifty or so zone managers across the country, the district court replied, I suggest you contact your hundred and fifty zone managers . . . . And then you produce the documents . . . that relate to the satellite. The district court stressed that GM must produce any GM satellite as to any document that's within the scope of their request. The court gave GM 60 days to produce the documents. 58 GM failed to produce any documents relating to satellite agreements by the deadline prescribed by the court. Instead, on October 29, 2004, 62 days after the order by the district court to produce the information, GM produced a list of 23 dealerships that had active satellite agreements and their locations. On November 11, 2004, GM supplemented its responses with 12 additional names and locations of dealerships with terminated satellite agreements. Even this late production by GM did not comply with the August 27, 2004, order. GM did not provide any documents. . . that relate[d] to the satellite dealerships, as ordered by the district court. Instead, it produced a list of the names and locations of the satellite dealerships. 59 GM argues that the August order and discovery requests required it to produce only a list of satellite dealerships. GM contends that the district court ordered it to produce documents within the scope of the discovery requests, and the only requests that asked for documents referenced a satellite program, which GM contends does not exist. GM argues that it produced the list of satellite dealerships, as requested, but did not provide any documents because GM has never had a satellite program. The problem for GM is that it did not make this argument to the district court during the August 27, 2004, hearing and the district court rejected this argument in the February 3, 2005, hearing. 60 The district court unambiguously instructed GM to produce all documents in its possession that related to satellite dealerships. Moreover, the record is clear that GM understood, at the August 27, 2004, and the February 3, 2005, hearings, what the district court ordered it to produce. Any argument to the contrary is unsupported by the record. 61 After GM produced the documents found in the search from the telephone calls, counsel for Serra repeatedly contacted counsel for GM regarding the failure to produce information regarding satellite dealerships that GM representatives testified existed in their depositions. Although Serra outlined alleged deficiencies in the production, the record does not reflect that GM took any action in response to these alleged deficiencies. When the district court issued an order to show cause why GM should not be sanctioned for the failure to comply with the earlier orders, GM finally undertook a manual search of its 4100 Chevrolet dealer files, which yielded nine undisclosed satellite dealerships and, on May 16, 2005, produced those additional documents. Only after this manual search could GM have known that the list was finally complete — seven and a half months after GM was ordered to produce the documents. 62 Although GM argues that the district court sanctioned GM because it failed to perform a manual search in the first instance, the factual record belies this assertion. GM contemplated that a manual search would be necessary to identify the requested documents during the August 27, 2004, hearing. If GM was unclear about the scope of the discovery request or the August 27, 2004, order, GM was obliged to request clarification from the court; it was not free to ignore the Order [of the district court] and to impose [its] own interpretation of the order. Carlucci, 775 F.2d at 1448 (citations omitted). 63 Although GM should have understood the scope of the discovery order following the August 27, 2004, hearing, any doubts GM had about the scope of discovery should have disappeared by February 3, 2005, when the district court found the production was deficient and threatened sanctions for failing to provide documents in its possession and control relating to specific satellite dealerships. The district court gave GM 14 days to cure the deficiencies, but GM did not perform a manual search until more than three months later, on May 12, 2005. It was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to conclude that the failure of GM to produce documents about satellite dealerships was due to contumacy rather than good faith misinterpretation.