The plaintiff brought suit alleging that a former pharmacy technician used her position to access plaintiff’s pharmacy records and disclose her personal medical information to the plaintiff’s ex-husband, among others. After summary judgment was granted in the pharmacy’s favor, plaintiff argued on appeal that the district court should have compelled additional discovery which may have provided further basis for her claims. The Tenth Circuit ruled, among other things, that “we perceive no abuse of discretion in the district court’s holding that plaintiff’s requests for ‘all email from the former pharmacist’s Walgreen’s email account’ were overbroad. Rather than being tailored to ascertaining whether Walgreen disciplined Ms. Whitlock for (allegedly) disclosing Ms. Touhy’s condition – the information Ms. Touhy says she wanted to discover – these requests cast a much wider net, encompassing much information irrelevant to that stated purpose, of a potentially personal nature, or protected by attorney-client privilege. Further, the burdens and costs associated with electronic discovery, such as those seeking ‘all email,’ are by now well known, and district courts are properly encouraged to weigh the expected benefits and burdens posed by particular discovery requests (electronic and otherwise) to ensure that collateral discovery disputes do not displace trial on the merits as the primary focus of the parties’ attention.” See Regan-Touhy v. Walgreen, 526 F.3d 641 (10th Cir. 2008).
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