EAST ST. LOUIS – Magistrate Judge Reona Daly ordered non-profit organization Phyllis Schlafly's American Eagles (PSAE) to produce documents related to Eagle Forum as part of a trademark infringement lawsuit.
According to Daly's Nov. 29 order, PSAE and Eagle Trust Fund (ETF) refused to provide roughly 1,000 documents requested during discovery by Eagle Forum and several individual plaintiffs due to a privilege dispute.
The plaintiffs responded by asking the court to hold PSAE in civil contempt of court in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois.
Daly
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Daly entered an order on Feb. 1 overruling "PSAE and ETF's assertion of privilege based on the common interest doctrine and ordered the production of all communications withheld on such basis."
PSAE then sought clarification of the Feb. 1 order requiring the documents be produced with an updated privilege log.
In her Nov. 29 order, Daley wrote that the only exception to the previous ruling was communication between members of PSAE's board of directors and PSAE's attorney.
Earlier efforts to appeal the Feb. 1 document production order to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals were denied.
The defendants sought clarification of whether communications between parties involved in a parallel lawsuit were privileged in addition to the board members' and attorneys' communications, the order states.
Daly wrote that plaintiffs Anne Schlafly Cori, Eunie Smith, Cathie Adams, Carolyn McLarty, Rosina Kovar and Shirley Curry "reached out to PSAE and ETF to coordinate their compliance with this court's order" following the April 26 rejection of the appeal, but "despite various assurances, PSAE and ETF failed to produce any documents by the date the plaintiffs' (contempt motion" was filed on May 2, 2018."