ORDER ON JOINT STATEMENT RE DEFENDANTS' MOTION FOR PRODUCTION OF THIRD PARTY ESI Re: Dkt. No. 335

SUSAN VAN KEULEN, Magistrate Judge.

Before the Court is the parties' Joint Statement on Defendants' Motion for Determination of Discovery Dispute re Production of Third-Party ESI. ECF 335. One of the parties' disputes concerns whether the ESI Order in this case (ECF 168) applies to third party subpoenas. At best, the ESI Order is unclear on the issue, and the parties should have addressed it at the time they stipulated to ESI procedures rather than waiting until discovery was in its late stages. The Court reads Section IV of the ESI Order, which concerns the "processing" of third party documents, as relating to the format of third party productions. The Court views Section VI, which concerns email production and contains the disputed provisions about custodians and search terms, as applying to the parties, not third parties. This does not mean that parties have unfettered power to seek production of ESI from third parties, however. Among other things, the parties must avoid the imposition of undue burden or expense on third parties.

With this guidance, the parties are ORDERED that no later than noon on May 8, 2018, they must submit to the Court a jointly prepared chart with columns containing the following information concerning Defendants' subpoenas to third parties Chris Caras and ParaCore, LLC: category of information sought; Plaintiff's objection; Defendant's position; proposed compromises; and a blank column for the Court's order on each category. The chart must be filed on ECF and a Word version must be sent to svkpo@cand.uscourts.gov.

SO ORDERED.