CR Legal Team, LLP v. Carruthers & Roth, P.A., No. 1:25-cv-00921 (M.D.N.C. Oct. 20, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
Many ESI protocols contain a provision letting a requesting party serve document requests framed as search terms. A federal magistrate judge in North Carolina has ruled that one such provision did not limit a producing party's duty to search its email. In CR Legal Team, LLP v. Carruthers & Roth, P.A., the producing party searched its email only with terms its opponent had supplied. It produced a single email thread about its own rebrand, which the court called a central issue in the trademark dispute.
The court ordered a search beyond those terms. The new search reaches the personal email accounts of the two executives the producing party identified as the rebrand's decision-makers. It also reaches personal devices, theirs included. If the broader search turns up nothing more, the producing party must say so in a sworn attestation.
What happened
The plaintiff and the defendant are law firms. In discovery, the defendant sought the plaintiff's documents and communications about the rebrand. The plaintiff produced one email thread announcing the name change. It represented that a reasonable search had found nothing else.
That search used only terms the defendant had supplied. Citing its objections, the plaintiff left several of those terms out of the search. Personal devices went unsearched. The plaintiff asserted that two senior executives had made the rebrand decision in largely verbal communications. As the court noted, the one produced email named other groups inside the firm that worked on the name change. The production contained no internal communications with them.
The stipulated ESI protocol allowed each side a reasonable number of requests for emails containing specific search terms. It also directed the parties to confer on the number of search terms and the number of custodians. The plaintiff argued that the protocol confined email discovery to search-term hits.
The court's analysis
The court rejected the plaintiff's reading of the protocol. In the court's view, the plaintiff was using the protocol as a shield from its discovery obligations. The court explained that the protocol leaves in place a party's affirmative duty under Rule 34. That duty requires a party to seek information reasonably available from its employees, agents, and others under its control. The protocol permits search-term requests, the court reasoned, without making them the sole means of satisfying a request for email production.
The court noted that the party resisting discovery generally bears the burden of persuasion. It concluded that the plaintiff had not carried that burden. The produced email and the firm's earlier use of the new name in social media posts, in the court's view, suggested that more documents exist.
The court ordered a search unconstrained by the defendant's terms. It covers personal devices, including the two executives' devices, and every email address, professional or personal, that the two executives used. The court also ordered a search of the work email of all the firm's own attorneys in Greensboro. Although the plaintiff described the decision as largely verbal, the court explained that searching personal devices can confirm whether any written communications exist. The court applied the same reading of the protocol to the plaintiff's emails with its advertising agencies.
The plaintiff must also produce its ESI retention policies, to the extent they exist. The plaintiff had said it did not believe it had an ESI retention policy. If the expanded search adds nothing about the rebrand, the plaintiff must provide a sworn attestation to that effect.
Apart from a request for regional advertising-spending records the plaintiff said it stopped tracking after 2021, the court granted the defendant's motion to compel. The order also resolved scheduling and deposition disputes that do not involve ESI.
Why it matters
A search-term provision in an ESI protocol sits alongside the Rule 34 duty to search. A producing party should treat the requesting party's terms as one part of its email review, not the whole of it.
Before producing, counsel should check whether the documents being produced name people or groups whose communications are missing from the set. A court may treat those missing communications as a sign that more documents exist. The North Carolina court drew that inference partly from the groups named in the plaintiff's one produced email.
A court may order a search of decision-makers' personal devices and accounts even when the party says the decision was made in conversation. Counsel should identify every account and device the key decision-makers used for the business in dispute, personal ones included, before the first production.
A party whose expanded search finds nothing may have to say so under oath. Before signing that attestation, the party should be able to describe what was searched. It should also be able to explain why the search reached every likely source.
Counsel should learn the client's ESI retention practices before calling any search complete. A court may order written retention policies produced.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
