Tobacco Documents - Order of MN Supreme Court (March 27, 1998)
STATE OF MINNESOTAIN SUPREME COURT CX-98-414 and CX-98-431
OFFICE OF
APPELLATE COURTS
March 27, 1998
Filed
State of Minnesota, by Hubert H. Humphrey, III.
its Attorney General and Blue Cross and
Blue Shield of Minnesota,
Respondents,
vs.
Philip Morris Incorporated, et al.,
Petitioners,
Liggett Group, Inc.,
Defendants.
O R D E R
WHEREAS, Philip Morris, Inc. and R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company have separately filed petitions for further review of the March 17, 1998, order of the Court of Appeals denying their alternative petitions for a writ of prohibition or a writ of mandamus; and
WHEREAS, by order of this court filed on March 19, 1998, all proceedings with regard to the two discovery orders filed in the Ramsey County District Court on March 7, 1998, were stayed;
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the petitions for further review be, and the same are, denied. The effect of this order is stayed until 5:00 p.m., Wednesday, April 1, 1998.
Dated: March 27, 1998
BY THE COURT:
Kathleen A. Blatz
Chief Justice
PAGE, J. and GILBERT, J. took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.
M E M O R AN D U M
By its order of March 25, 1997, the district court appointed a Special Master to assist the court with a complex discovery process in which multiple defendants, including the petitioners, asserted privilege to several hundred thousand documents. By its orders of May 9, 1997 and May 22, 1997, the district court established a subject-matter categorization procedure for the sorting of documents for which a privilege was asserted. Pursuant to this procedure, sample documents from the 14 designated categories were examined by the Special Master, hearings were conducted, and entire categories of documents were declared either discoverable or protected by virtue of the representative review. By implementing this discovery process, the district court recognized the virtually unprecedented dimension of discovery and assertion of privilege involved in this case, which has been pending since August 1994.
In their alternative petitions to the court of appeals for a writ of mandamus or a writ of prohibition, the denial of which the petitioners now ask us to review, petitioners sought to restrain the district court from enforcing its two orders filed on March 7, 1998, directing discovery. While we have reviewed earlier petitions relating to the discovery process, on this occasion the petitioners essentially urge this court to direct the district court to begin anew to engage in a more comprehensive and document-specific review of potentially as many as 230,000 documents to which petitioners claim one or more privileges, including attorney-client, opinion or fact work product, or joint defense.
We recognize petitioners' concern that effective review of discovery orders occurs prior to disclosure of documents, but the extraordinary relief they seek is, as a practical matter, an impossibility. One of the petitions for further review purports to direct our attention to a finite number of documents which, it is asserted, demonstrates the flaw or error in the categorization process, but, in fact, both petitions sweep broadly, suggesting that procedural due process is satisfied only with a document-by-document consideration. The practical impossibility of the relief sought by petitioners mandates that we deny their request for discretionary review.
It should be noted that our order today does not address or decide the propriety of the process established by the district court to deal with the volume of material before it; rather, it does acknowledge the interlocutory nature of the orders at issue and the practical impossibility of the relief sought. While, by operation of the subject orders of the district court, many of the documents are discoverable, there remains the inquiry as to the relevancy of these documents and their admissibility-issues which will undoubtedly be carefully considered by the district court.