DISCOVERY ORDER

Re: ECF No. 96

JON S. TIGAR, District Judge.

I. BACKGROUND

On April 4, 2016, the parties submitted a joint discovery brief, ECF No. 96, in which they dispute Plaintiffs' request to PricewaterhouseCoopers ("PwC") for data to support their statistical analysis. Plaintiffs ask the Court to "either (1) order PwC to produce the Source11 database in full, or (2) defer ruling until the parties have addressed [] back-end options" for accessing the Source1 data. ECF No. 97-4 at 1. PwC objects that Plaintiffs' data request "calls overwhelmingly for irrelevant information that is disproportionate to the needs of the case." Id. at 6. PwC asserts that it remains willing to "proceed with assembling the list of potential class members and the agreed-upon data fields for those individuals and their comparators, once Plaintiffs provide a reasonable age proxy;" the process PwC claims the parties already agreed to in December 2016. Id. at 11.

II. DISCUSSION

Consistent with its usual practice — particularly in discovery disputes — and as the Court has previously indicated to the parties, the Court here attempts to resolve the dispute by adopting one of the parties' positions2: either that PwC produce the Source1 database in its entirety, as Plaintiffs request, or continue under the "two stage" data production process they agreed to in late 2016, as PwC requests. The Court will adopt PwC's proposal.

The Court starts by acknowledging that statistical evidence is "unquestionably relevant" in employment discrimination cases. Diaz v. Am. Tel. & Tel., 752 F.2d 1356, 1362-63 (9th Cir. 1985). That includes cases brought under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act ("ADEA"). See, e.g., Pines v. State Farm Gen. Ins. Co., No. SACV89-631, 1992 WL 92398, at *4 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 25, 1992). What is disputed here is the scope of that discovery before conditional certification of a collective action.

Simply put, Plaintiffs' position is not reasonable. Plaintiffs identify no case in which the court ordered production of a defendant's entire employment database,3 much less a database containing "more than two million applications," as PwC's Source1 database does. ECF No. 97-4 at 6. Plaintiffs do not argue that even half of these applications have any relevance to Plaintiffs' claims. Even accepting for the sake of argument Plaintiffs' characterization of the burden to produce this information as low, Plaintiffs' request is not justified because the majority of the discovery demanded is irrelevant. The one case Plaintiffs cite in support of their raw data request, Chen-Oster v. Goldman, Sachs & Co., 285 F.R.D. 294, 305 (S.D.N.Y. 2012), does not support their argument. In that case, the court acknowledged that there is no "legal impediment" to requiring production of a defendant's entire database, but ultimately refused to order the defendant to do so due to "the costs involved in converting the mass of unorganized data provided into useable information." Id.

Defendant's alternative is the more reasonable one. Defendant seeks to limit pre-certification data discovery to the agreement the parties reached through a series of emails in December 2016. The parties created the following two-stage process:

ECF No. 96-7 at 4 (internal citations and quotation marks omitted). Plaintiffs appear to have agreed to this process. ECF No. 96-8 at 2 ("[T]he two-step process you describe appears to be exactly what we envision.").4 Although the data generated by this process may not be robust enough for a merits-stage statistical analysis, it is sufficient to support a motion to conditionally certify a collective action. And of the two options presented to the Court, it is by far the more reasonable.

III. CONCLUSION

The Court orders the parties to proceed under the two-stage data discovery plan outlined above.5

IT IS SO ORDERED.