## Facts

- African-American Baltimore City Police Department officers sued the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore and the Baltimore City Police Department alleging race discrimination in the disciplinary system, asserted as individual and putative class claims.
- Plaintiffs served extensive Rule 33 interrogatories and Rule 34 document requests seeking both paper records and electronically stored information (ESI), including information about the defendants’ IT systems, archived data, email, and retention policies.
- Defendants objected broadly on burden and expense grounds, using generalized objections rather than request-specific explanations.
- After unsuccessful meet-and-confer efforts, plaintiffs moved to compel.
- Defendants submitted an affidavit from the police department’s IT manager describing limited IT staffing and competing demands, but providing limited quantitative detail about retrieval burden or costs.
- Defendants also sought protection addressing the cost of privilege review for large ESI productions and the consequences of inadvertent disclosure of privileged material.

## Issues

1. Whether defendants’ generalized burden and expense objections justified limiting or denying plaintiffs’ ESI discovery requests.
2. What showing is required to support a Rule 26(b)(2) proportionality/cost-burden limitation on large-scale ESI discovery.
3. Under what terms ESI may be produced while protecting attorney-client privilege and work product from waiver due to inadvertent production.

## Decision

- The court granted the motion to compel in substantial part and required more complete responses to plaintiffs’ interrogatories and document requests concerning ESI.
- The court rejected boilerplate objections and required objections to be stated with specificity and supported by concrete evidence.
- The court directed a structured approach to ESI discovery, including targeted or phased production and development of an adequate record for any proportionality or cost arguments.
- The court approved a protective “claw-back” arrangement governing inadvertent production of privileged or work-product material and limiting waiver consequences under the court-ordered terms.

## Legal Principles

- Objections to interrogatories and document requests must be specific; generalized, boilerplate objections are insufficient.
- A party resisting discovery as unduly burdensome must provide detailed, non-conclusory evidence sufficient to permit Rule 26(b)(2) proportionality analysis (e.g., retrieval steps, time, cost, and system constraints), not merely assertions of burden or expense.
- ESI is discoverable on the same footing as paper records, subject to proportionality limits and case-management tools that tailor scope and sequencing.
- Courts may manage large ESI productions through staged or targeted discovery to balance relevance, burden, and cost.
- Courts may enter protective orders implementing claw-back procedures so that inadvertent disclosure, when promptly addressed under the order, does not operate as a privilege waiver for purposes governed by the order.

## Conclusion

The court largely compelled ESI discovery, holding that unsupported burden objections do not defeat otherwise relevant requests, and it facilitated proportional production through phased management and a court-approved claw-back order to reduce privilege-review costs and limit waiver from inadvertent disclosure.


Hopson v. Mayor & City Council of Balt., 232 F.R.D. 228 (D. Md. 2005)