Is The Power to Destroy

If any further evidence were needed, here’s Amgen Inc. & Subsidiaries, Docket No. 16017-21, filed 9/3/24.

IRS hits Pfizer, marketing joint venturer with Amgen, with a blockbuster duces tecum. Pfizer can come up with the documents they shared with Amgen, but IRS wants Pfizer’s internal stuff. Pfizer claims it would cost $1 million to do the document review (relevance and privilege). Pfizer employs an in-house Global Discovery Counsel, whom I’ll call Mr. B.

“Mr. B represents that Pfizer does not maintain a centralized computer system that could be searched for responsive documents. Instead, the best approach to collecting responsive documents is through document custodians. Mr. B identified 20 relevant document custodians related to the internal analysis documents and 4 document custodians related to the internal dispute documents. Most of these document custodians are no longer employed at Pfizer and due to the passage of time, Mr. B indicates that Pfizer cannot be certain it identified all relevant document custodians.” Order, at p. 5.

Judge Travis A. (“Tag”) Greaves reviews the requirements for third-party subpoenas. Distilling all the somber reasoning and copious citation of precedent, it comes down to how much burden does it put on the nonparty for how much return to the party. Here, there’s a contract between Pfizer and Amgen, State law gives a lot of room to interpret it, and whatever shared stuff Mr. B. can come up with will do.

Taishoff draws some conclusions. One, discovery has gone totally bonkers.  Here, IRS wants “a large collection of documents that relate to the HCR Fees over a five-year period of time. While respondent tailored the requests to seek only those documents related to the HCR Fees, Mr. B represents that the subpoena still requires Pfizer to review over a million documents that are between ten and fourteen years old.” Order, at p. 5. And having to employ an attorney solely to deal with discovery (Global Discovery, yet) shows that the disease is spreading.

Two, technology has facilitated discovery to such an extent that the best defense is to eschew technology altogether. Pfizer’s globalists employ basic infantry tactics: spread out, keep moving, rotate personnel.