Eli Lilly and Co. v. Adonis Health, Inc., No. 25-cv-03536-JST (LB) (N.D. Cal. Oct. 14, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
Many stipulated ESI orders now include provisions on hyperlinked files and collaboration platforms. A federal magistrate judge in California has read the hyperlink clause in one such order narrowly, as deciding only whether a linked file belongs to a document family. In Eli Lilly and Co. v. Adonis Health, Inc., the producing party's emails included hundreds of automated notifications from cloud platforms. Some named documents on the marketing claims in dispute.
The court ordered collection from five of those platforms. In its view, the duty to collect comes from the Federal Rules, which the hyperlink clause leaves in place. The same order denied a request that the producing party identify every other source it had left unsearched.
What happened
Lilly sued Henry Meds (Adonis Health, Inc.) for false advertising and unfair competition. Its surviving claims allege that Henry markets compounded versions of Lilly's tirzepatide drugs as personalized while selling the same mass-compounded product to every patient. The parties' stipulated ESI order treats a hyperlinked file as outside the family of the document containing the link, subject to a request procedure. For collaboration platforms, the order directs the parties to confer about proportional mechanisms and parameters for production.
The emails Henry produced included hundreds of automated notifications from cloud platforms. Five of those platforms, including Asana, Figma, and the analytics tool Heap, became the subject of the dispute. Henry had collected from none of the five.
Lilly moved to compel collection from the five platforms. It also asked the court to order Henry to identify any other ESI sources it had not searched.
The court's analysis
Henry argued that the hyperlink and collaboration-platform provisions supplied the exclusive procedure. Under that reading, Lilly's only remedy was to request specific hyperlinked files. The court rejected the argument. A link from a produced email, the court explained, does not exempt the linked repository from collection. Most of Lilly's examples, it noted, were notifications of platform activity rather than hyperlinked documents.
The court located the duty to search a source reasonably likely to hold responsive documents in Rules 26(g) and 34. The parties' collaboration-platform clause contemplates production from collaboration platforms without displacing that duty. In the court's words, the clause is "a provision about how, not whether."
As the court noted, a requesting party's mere suspicion that more documents exist will not support a motion to compel. The court concluded that Lilly had shown more than suspicion. Drawn from Henry's own production, the notifications named tasks, boards, drafts, and charts on the personalization claims. Henry conceded that it had not collected from the platforms. The court treated the notifications and that concession as "specific, document-level evidence of responsive, uncollected material."
The court also concluded that proportionality favored the discovery. Henry had not quantified its burden with data volumes, cost estimates, or vendor timelines, the court observed. The order directs Henry to run the negotiated search terms and technology-assisted review against each platform, adapted as needed to each platform's data format.
The court denied Lilly's second request. Rule 26(g) requires a reasonable inquiry, the court explained, rather than an inventory of a party's information systems for the requesting party to audit. Henry had closed the two earlier gaps Lilly identified, Notion and custodians' individual Google Drive folders. The court took that history as a sign that the conferral process was working.
In a footnote, the court described a narrower option it chose not to order. That option was a one-time written list of the cloud platforms custodians use. For each platform, the list would state whether Henry had collected and produced from that source. In the court's view, a procedure for adding sources works only if the requesting party knows what sources exist.
Why it matters
A party that wants to exclude a platform from collection should propose that exclusion at the ESI conference and support it with a proportionality showing. A clause about how platform data will be produced, on the Eli Lilly court's reading, creates no such exclusion.
Review teams on both sides should read the automated notifications in a production. A producing party can use them to find the sources its custodians worked in before the requesting party raises those sources at a conference. For a requesting party, notifications that name documents on the disputed issues are the evidence the Eli Lilly court treated as more than mere suspicion. Paired with an admission that the platform went uncollected, such notifications can carry a requesting party's initial burden, as Lilly's did. The footnote's one-time platform list gives a requesting party facing gaps revealed one at a time a concrete proposal for the next conference.
A party resisting collection on burden grounds should put the data volume, the cost, and the vendor's timeline in the record. A forecast that discovery deadlines will slip, offered without those numbers, is unlikely to carry the objection.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
