Apple’s last-minute attempt to slow the court case it is engaged in against Epic faced a setback as the presiding Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson last week denied the Cupertino-based company’s attempt to push the deadline beyond Monday to produce a trove of documents.
In early August, Apple was given a deadline of September 30 to produce documents relating to the changes it made to its App Store rules this year, which was its attempt to satisfy an injunction.
Apple initially told the court that the task would entail reviewing roughly 650,000 documents — but in a status report on Thursday, said the number had swelled to over 1.3 million, and asked for a two-week extension.
Judge Hixson called Apple’s last-minute request for an extension “bad behaviour,” and went further in his assessment of Apple’s tactics.
“Before yesterday’s report Apple never previewed to Epic Games or to the Court that the number of documents it would need to review exceeded its prior estimate by a substantial amount. This information would have been apparent to Apple weeks ago. It is simply not believable that Apple learned of this information only in the two weeks following the last status report. This gives rise to several related concerns. First, Apple’s status reports weren’t any good.”
He noted that with Apple’s resources, “it could probably review that many documents in a weekend” if it wanted to.
But, he added, producing the documents quickly “is all downside for Apple,” given how they relate to Epic’s allegations that the company hadn’t actually complied with Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ injunction.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presided over the Epic lawsuit that resulted in those changes, told Apple’s legal team on May 31 that it would need to produce all documents related to how it decided the new App Store rules after Epic challenged them.
“This is a classic moral hazard,” Hixson said in the order last week, “and the way Apple announced out of the blue four days before the substantial completion deadline that it would not make that deadline because of a document count that it had surely been aware of for weeks hardly creates the impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.”
