Corriveau v. Factory Mutual Insurance Co., No. 1:24-cv-00422-JJM-AEM, D.R.I. (July 7, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
A request for production that asks for emails and text messages but never says what form they should arrive in has already given away the answer. The responding party picks. A District of Rhode Island magistrate judge made that concrete on July 7, refusing to order a defendant to index its production by category and ordering it produced instead under the default in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34(b)(2)(E)(ii). The ruling is short, and it is a useful corrective for anyone still working from a document request template written before ESI was the whole of discovery.
What Happened
Patrick Corriveau began working at FM Global in May 2005 as a Solution Architect. When the company required its employees to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination, he sought an exemption on religious grounds and was denied. FM Global terminated him shortly after, and he sued for religious discrimination and retaliation.
Discovery generated two motions before Magistrate Judge Amy Moses. Corriveau moved to quash fifteen document subpoenas served on third-party employers and recruiters along with two deposition subpoenas, and separately moved to compel fuller responses to six interrogatories and eight requests for production. The court granted each motion in part and denied each in part, expanding the comparator discovery well beyond Corriveau's twelve-person team along the way. The ruling with the longest reach for other cases, though, concerns a single request for production.
That request, RFP 4, sought "any and all documents which relate or refer in any way to the Plaintiff" in the case, and then listed categories, among them personnel records, wage records, emails, and text messages. FM Global's response directed Corriveau to "see all documents produced." He objected to that answer and asked the court to require an itemized index of the production, organized by category with corresponding Bates ranges.
The Court's Analysis
The court declined to order the index, observing that Corriveau supplied no authority supporting the request. FM Global, for its part, characterized the request as one that "seeks a broad array of documents related to Plaintiff 'in any way'" and listed the categories of documents it had already produced.
Having refused the index, the court supplied what the rules actually provide. Because the request "does not specify a form for producing electronically stored information," the court held, FM Global "must produce it in a form or forms in which it is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form or forms." That is Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(ii) doing exactly what it was written to do. The motion was granted in part and denied in part, and the production obligation the court imposed was the rule's own default rather than the organizational scheme Corriveau wanted.
Why It Matters
The requesting party controls the form of production only while the request is still being drafted. Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(ii) is a fallback, and fallbacks run against whoever failed to speak. Name the form in the request itself. Native files with their metadata, load file specifications, text extraction, and the treatment of spreadsheets and short messages all belong in the request, not in a meet-and-confer letter written after a production arrives in an unhelpful shape.
The second lesson is about remedies. A production delivered without organization feels like an obvious problem, and a party facing one instinctively asks the court for a categorical index. Corriveau made that ask and lost it for want of any cited authority. Relief of that kind has to be tied to a rule, an ESI protocol provision, or a case, and a motion that simply asserts the production is unwieldy gives the court nothing to grant.
There is a drafting point underneath both. A request built on "any and all documents" that "relate or refer in any way" to a party invites a response in kind. Requests calibrated to identified custodians, date ranges, and data sources are harder to answer with an undifferentiated production, and they leave a court something specific to enforce.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
