In De La Torre v. Legal Recovery Law Office, 2014 WL 1279738 (S.D.Cal. 2014), Magistrate Judge Bartick ordered defendant to produce phone bills, but only for the time relevant in the Complaint and redacted to exclude calls made to parties other than the Plaintiff.
Here, the Court concludes Defendant’s phone bills are only relevant to the extent they contain evidence of Defendant’s telephone communications with Plaintiff. As stated above, Plaintiff alleges in the Second Amended Complaint that Defendant’s agents made “about a dozen calls” to Plaintiff that were abusive or otherwise improper. (ECF No. 44 at 6:21–22.) Thus, any portions of Defendant’s phone bills that identify incoming calls from Plaintiff or outgoing calls to Plaintiff are relevant to these proceedings. However, the Court sees no reasonable basis for requiring Defendant to produce phone records pertaining to calls made to third parties where such calls have nothing to do with Plaintiff’s allegations in this case which, the Court is quick to recognize, is not a putative class action. Indeed, such third party calls are not “relevant to any party’s claim or defense,” FED. R. CIV. P. 26(b)(1), and Plaintiff has not demonstrated how they are “reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.” FED. R. CIV. P. 26(b)(1). ¶ Defendant’s meet and confer proposal to produce call logs for phone numbers associated with Defendant is insufficient. Presumably, the calls logs will match the phone bill records perfectly. However, production of the phone bills offers Plaintiff a second, independent source of verifying the number of phone calls at issue. The Court notes that the Second Amended Complaint alleges Defendant placed phone calls to Plaintiff to more than one phone number. Thus, to the extent Plaintiff has not already done so, Plaintiff shall provide Defendant with a list of all telephone numbers associated with phones on which Plaintiff received any calls from Defendant or made any calls to Defendant. Finally, only Defendant’s phone bills covering the period of January 2012 through June 2012 shall be produced. As the Second Amended Complaint alleges, all relevant calls occurred during this time period. Thus, Defendant should not be required to produce phone records for periods of time during which Plaintiff admittedly did not receive or make any calls. ¶ The Court does not find persuasive Plaintiff’s argument during the meet and confer process that in other cases Capital One was ordered to produce two years of phone bills totaling 100,000’s of pages and Chase was ordered to produce a year’s worth of phone bills. Plaintiff fails to identify these cases in the instant motion, which makes it impossible for the Court to determine the applicability of those cases to the facts alleged in this case. ¶ In addition, although Judge McCurine’s order did not discuss whether the phone bills should be redacted, the Court finds that, prior to production, Defendant shall redact all third party telephone numbers and other third party identifying information. As stated above, such information is not relevant to Plaintiff’s claims in this case. Plaintiff has failed to justify her meet and confer demand for unredacted phone bills. In addition, Defendant shall not be required to produce pages of phone bills that do not contain any reference to calls to Plaintiff’s phone numbers. To require otherwise would force Defendant to incur needless costs in redacting pages having no relevance to this case.