Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Charles Faulk, an African American male, was hired by Owens Corning in June 2016 as a Utility Operator and later held positions including forklift driver and Raw Material Coordinator. In February 2022, Faulk alleged his supervisor prevented him from collecting overtime wages by blocking overtime hours and fraudulently cutting off overtime collection in the company portal. In June 2022, Faulk was suspended and drug tested following a forklift accident; he claims two non-African American employees involved in similar forklift incidents were not drug tested. Faulk filed an EEOC charge in July 2022 and subsequently sued under Title VII alleging race discrimination and retaliation.
During discovery, Faulk served a Rule 30(b)(6) deposition notice on Owens Corning’s corporate representative covering 17 topics, ranging from corporate structure to discrimination complaints to record-keeping policies. Owens Corning objected to many topics as overbroad, irrelevant, or burdensome. Faulk moved to enforce the deposition notice, seeking to compel production of a corporate representative, reimbursement of motion costs, and sequencing the defendant’s deposition before his own.
The Court’s Holding
The court granted in part and denied in part Faulk’s motion, substantially narrowing the scope of permissible deposition topics. The court approved topics relating to corporate structure (since Owens Corning had disputed whether Faulk sued the correct entity), HR department composition and reporting relationships, anti-discrimination policies and their enforcement, performance review and compensation systems, and employee benefits—all subject to temporal and geographic limitations. The court struck educational backgrounds of HR employees as irrelevant and limited the temporal scope to one year before Faulk’s hire and one year after his termination.
The court rejected several broad categories of inquiry. It prohibited questioning about EEOC complaints filed by other employees, finding them confidential under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–8(e), and struck questions about all informal and formal discrimination complaints unrelated to Faulk’s specific claims as overbroad, burdensome, and disproportionate. The court also rejected inquiries into record-keeping and ESI search procedures, finding them irrelevant to the underlying Title VII claim. For remaining approved topics, the court imposed limitations: restricting inquiry to the specific location where Faulk worked, the positions he held or applied for, and the time period of his employment plus one year before and after.
Key Takeaways
- Corporate structure topics are relevant in discrimination cases when the defendant raises entity identity as a defense, rejecting attempts to hide behind corporate form.
- Comparative discrimination complaints about other employees are generally discoverable only when probative of discrimination patterns; blanket requests for all complaints are overbroad and strike as disproportionate to case needs.
- EEOC complaints by other employees are confidential and protected from disclosure, even in discrimination litigation discovery.
- Courts will impose temporal, geographic, and subject-matter limits on corporate representative deposition topics to prevent overbreadth and undue burden, requiring specificity about positions and locations at issue.
Why It Matters
This decision provides useful guidance on the boundaries of discovery in Title VII employment discrimination cases. It confirms that while defendants cannot shield themselves from discovery through corporate structure defenses, plaintiffs must still narrow comparative evidence requests to avoid imposing unreasonable burdens on defendants. The court’s emphasis on proportionality and specificity—requiring plaintiffs to identify relevant positions, locations, and time periods—reflects modern discovery principles that balance the need for probative evidence against the costs and burdens of broad discovery.
The rejection of blanket EEOC complaint discovery is particularly significant, as it clarifies that confidentiality protections apply even when such complaints are sought in litigation. For practitioners, the decision underscores the importance of careful meet-and-confer discussions over deposition scope and the court’s willingness to intervene when parties deadlock on scheduling or scope, imposing firm deadlines to move discovery forward.