Deny VTEL's Motion to Compel More Documents, Urge Defendants

Vermont National Telephone’s demand that the relevant time period for discovery should extend “to the present date” in its fraud claim about the 2015 AWS-3 auction should be denied, said defendants Dish Network and American AWS-3 Wireless in their Monday responses to VTEL’s motion to compel.

Dish agreed to produce records from July 2013 to October 2015 -- the 15 months before and 10 months after the November 2014-January 2015 auction, said its response (docket 1:15-cv-00728) filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, but relator VTEL asserted the discovery should extend eight years beyond when the alleged fraud occurred because “the entire business and operations of SNR [Wireless] and Northstar … are tied to Auction 97” and are relevant to VTEL’s allegations.

VTEL’s position should be rejected because discovery of documents from October 2015 to the present would be unlikely to yield evidence relevant to its claims, Dish said. “To the extent discovery beyond October 2015 is warranted, it should be justified on a request-by-request basis.” Dish remains willing to confer with VTEL about a “reasonable search” for documents on Northstar’s and SNR’s exercise of contractual put rights post October 2015, “but an open-ended, expensive, and time-consuming probe” over eight years shouldn't be permitted, it said.

In its opposition, SNR said VTEL’s motion to compel “is not really about documents.” SNR has produced over 3,000 documents totaling over 30,000 pages during its investigation of VTEL’s claims and continues to search for responsive documents and will continue to do so for the nine requests identified in the motion, said its response to the motion. VTEL refused SNR’s offers to negotiate search terms as a way to “bridge the gap” in the parties’ discovery disputes or to further confer by phone or videoconference, the defendant said, calling the motion “tactical, not substantive.”

VTEL’s amended complaint asserts a “single, speculative theory of liability” that SNR sought to obtain wireless licenses in Auction 97 by submitting applications for small-business discounts to the FCC that failed to disclose an alleged “secret agreement” whereby SNR agreed to later transfer the licenses to Dish. But the FCC, after reviewing agreements between SNR and Dish, decided not to award credits for "very small businesses" to SNR, saying disclosed agreements enabled Dish to force SNR to transfer its licenses to Dish, SNR said.

VTEL is “not a classic insider with pre-existing knowledge about an alleged fraud, but rather a disappointed competitor who filed suit on a theory that an additional, undisclosed agreement ‘must’ have existed,” said the response. VTEL’s motion is a “transparent fishing expedition” to require SNR to review “tens of thousands of documents” unrelated to the pre-Auction 97 “secret agreement theory,” it said.