Apple made a last-second attempt to hold off on producing many of the documents until Monday as ordered in its ongoing dispute with Epic, and Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson isn’t having it. In early August, the company was given a deadline of September 30 to submit the documents this year, it was his attempt to secure an order. Apple initially told the court the task would require reviewing about 650,000 documents — but said in a status report Thursday that the number had exceeded 1.3 million, and asked for a two-week extension. Hixson strongly rejected the request on Friday noted by and called this move by Apple “bad behavior”.
The judge noted that Apple and Epic file joint status reports with the court every two weeks, and that the issue of Apple’s filings exceeding previous estimates never came up. “This information would have been apparent to Apple weeks ago,” Hixson said in the order. “Apple learning this information two weeks after the last status report is simply unbelievable.” The judge said the request raises other concerns, calling into question the quality of Apple’s reports and its intentions to comply on time. According to Hixson, Apple has “almost unlimited resources” it can use to complete a task in the allotted time.
“It’s classic moral hazard,” Hixson said, “and Apple announced four days before the deadline that it would certainly not meet that deadline because of the number of documents it was aware of. for weeks, it doesn’t give the impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.
