Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Plaintiff Madison Meyer alleges in her operative Third Amended Complaint that she and her family were subjected to unauthorized video surveillance at Rady Children's Hospital–San Diego following child abuse allegations. Her seventh cause of action asserts a Monell claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against the County of San Diego. She alleges that County policies, customs, and deliberately indifferent failures to train and supervise Health and Human Services Agency personnel caused constitutional violations, including covert hospital-room surveillance and nonemergency medical examinations without adequate consent or judicial authorization, and the submission of false or misleading reports to the juvenile court. These are allegations only; the order makes no findings on them.
Plaintiffs originally noticed a Rule 30(b)(6) deposition of the County with 49 topic categories and dozens of subcategories. After an informal discovery conference on August 31, 2026, the court found the notice overbroad and directed the parties to meet and confer. The parties then jointly obtained leave to use interrogatories in place of testimony on certain topics, and the County produced three witnesses who testified for 16.5 hours. Seventeen categories in Plaintiffs' Second Amended Notice remained disputed. After a second conference, the court directed the County to move for a protective order under Rule 26(c). The County argued that the categories improperly demand expert opinion and legal conclusions from a lay witness and are unduly burdensome and disproportionate.
The Court’s Holding
The court denied the motion, holding that the County failed to show good cause under Rule 26(c). On the expert-opinion argument, it declined to follow Dagdagan v. City of Vallejo and Silva v. San Pablo Police Department. Dagdagan involved abstract or hypothetical questions put to a lay witness, and the Silva topic asked whether employees' acts accorded with department policies. By contrast, the topics here seek the facts known or reasonably available to the County about how its customs, policies, practices, and training applied to these Plaintiffs, including any respect in which the County contends an employee departed from them. The court reasoned that whether personnel conduct accorded with County customs and training goes to the Monell claim and does not call for expert opinion.
On undue burden, the court noted that the movant must show specific, undue harm and not merely the ordinary burdens of discovery. It acknowledged that the case is complex and that Rule 30(b)(6) does not require preparing a witness on every facet of the litigation. But it found the remaining categories sufficiently narrowed through the earlier meet-and-confer process to be proportional to the claims, and it concluded that the County's declarations estimating preparation time took an unreasonably broad view of the notice. The court did not rule individually on Plaintiffs' evidentiary objections to those declarations, explaining that it did not generally rely on the challenged statements. It granted Plaintiffs leave to take the deposition and, absent further leave of court, limited the remaining Rule 30(b)(6) deposition to seven hours.
Key Takeaways
- A Rule 30(b)(6) topic asking what facts an entity knows about how its own policies were applied to named plaintiffs, including where it contends employees departed from them, was held not to seek improper expert opinion.
- The court contrasted this case-specific notice with the abstract or hypothetical questions at issue in Dagdagan, and with the broader policy-compliance topic quashed in Silva.
- A party seeking a Rule 26(c) protective order must show specific, undue harm, and preparation-time estimates that read the notice too broadly did not meet that burden here.
- Earlier narrowing of the notice through court-supervised meet-and-confer efforts supported the finding that the remaining topics were proportional.
- The order resolves only this protective-order motion; the deposition itself remains to be taken, limited to seven hours absent further leave, and the merits of the Monell claim are untouched.
Why It Matters
This is a magistrate judge's discovery order in a pending case, not a published opinion, and it does not bind other courts. Its value lies in showing how a Southern District of California court drew the line between entity-knowledge topics and abstract expert-opinion topics in a Monell case, distinguishing two out-of-district decisions rather than following them.
For municipal defendants, the order suggests that objecting to policy-compliance topics as calling for legal conclusions is unlikely to succeed when the topics are tied to the specific plaintiffs and to facts known to the entity, and that a burden showing must be concrete rather than a generalized estimate of preparation time. For plaintiffs, it shows that a court may pair a denial with a time cap to keep a broad deposition manageable.