Opinion ID: 1454261
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Whether Niswander's conduct constituted participation in the Rochlin lawsuit

Text: Niswander's claims were analyzed by the district court under the opposition clause without any explanation as to why her delivery of the confidential documents was not considered participation in the Rochlin lawsuit. She argues on appeal that her conduct was participatory because she produced the documents in response to discovery requests from CIC. In support of this argument, Niswander points to the two letters that she received from one of her attorneys in the Rochlin lawsuit, expressing the need to cooperate with discovery and asked her to locate any documents related to your employment at CIC which [she had] not already sent in. She also alleges that she was responding directly to CIC's Fifth Request for Production. CIC, she contends, was essentially request[ing] that she produce all documents[] which she felt supported her claims for discrimination. Temporally speaking, CIC does not dispute that the documents were delivered while Niswander was a participant in the Rochlin lawsuit. But that timing alone does not afford her the broad protections of the participation clause. Niswander seeks to justify her delivery of the documents on the basis of document-production requests that she never read, and she has never disputed her own admission that she had no documents to support an equal pay [claim]. This admission is fatal to her argument that her conduct should be deemed participation in the Rochlin lawsuit. If the documents that Niswander had given to her lawyers had been directly (or even indirectly) relevant to the EPA claims raised in the Rochlin lawsuit, her delivery of those documents would clearly constitute participation in that lawsuit. No explanation has been offered by either party as to why Niswander's lawyers felt that the documents in question were subject to CIC's document request. But Niswander's statement makes clear that she herself did not believe that the documents were relevant to the Rochlin lawsuit. This is not a case of an employee mistakenly or inadvertently delivering confidential information out of a belief that the documents provided direct proof of discrimination. Instead, Niswander delivered numerous documents, some of which were copies of e-mails from her supervisors related to her job performance, but some of which were claim-file documents that included confidential personal information of insured individuals. Those claim-file documents were delivered in order to help trigger Niswander's memory of instances of alleged retaliation. There is no dispute that she had those documents in her possession as a result of her employment duties, but the fact that she innocently acquired them is not sufficient to overcome her intentional and unnecessary dissemination of documents that were irrelevant to her EPA claim. Our analysis would be different if the documents that Niswander had given to her lawyers, and that they in turn produced to CIC, had reasonably supported her claim of gender-based pay discriminationor if she reasonably believed that they did. But on the basis of the facts before us, her delivery of the documents to her attorneys in the Rochlin lawsuit does not qualify as participation in that lawsuit. An individual's delivery of relevant documents during the discovery process or the giving of testimony at a deposition clearly falls within the ambit of participating in any manner in a Title VII proceeding. Hashimoto v. Dalton, 118 F.3d 671, 680 (9th Cir.1997) (explaining that the purpose of the participation clause is to protect the employee who utilizes the tools provided by Congress to protect his rights). But concluding that Niswander's conduct here is protected participation in the Rochlin lawsuit would provide employees with near-immunity for their actions in connection with antidiscrimination lawsuits, protecting them from disciplinary action even when they knowingly provide irrelevant, confidential information solely to jog their memory regarding instances of alleged retaliation.