the Defendant. Over a period of several months, the Plaintiff asked the Defendant if the Defendant had an exemplar vehicle in its possession. After months of delay, the Defendant finally reported that it did not. A month later, the Defendant’s cor- porate designee testified that the Defendant did not have an exemplar ve- hicle. A month later, in a resumption of the deposition of the Defendant’s corpo- rate designee, over objection of defense counsel, Defendant’s corporate designee admitted that the Defendant had an ex- emplar vehicle.


Plaintiff immediately


requested to have the opportunity for its expert to inspect and test the exemplar vehicle that was refused by the Defendant. The Defendant’s sole explanation to the Court as to why the exemplar vehicle was not produced was based upon the Plaintiff ’s alleged failure to serve a Rule 34 request for production of the exem- plar vehicle. The Court concluded that “Textron’s position exalted form over sub- stance and served as another example of Textron’s resistence to legitimate discov- ery requests.” The Court appeared deeply disturbed


by Defendant’s failure to produce docu- ments. Particularly troubling was the volume of the documents produced and when they were produced.


In response


to the Plaintiff ’s document request, the Defendant produced a single page. After Plaintiff served motions to compel, and filed one motion which the Court granted, the Defendant produced 470 additional pages of documents. After Plaintiff filed a Motion for Sanctions, claiming that the documents produced by


(Continued on page 40)


Winter 2001


Trial Reporter


11


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