Google Says Plaintiffs Are Asking For “Irrelevant” Docs In Antitrust Case

Google’s lawyers argued in a filing in Manhattan federal court that the plaintiffs have asked for “irrelevant” records outside the scope of court orders in the advertising multidistrict litigation and that the company has already turned over about 850,000 documents, reported Reuters.

The filing from Google’s attorneys at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer was a response to assertions on Monday, January 31, in a filing from the plaintiffs’ lawyers accusing Google of “gamesmanship and delay.”

The plaintiffs contend Google has not provided all the documents that the company, in related litigation, gave to a group of states, including Texas, that sued in 2020 over alleged antitrust violations concerning advertising technology, widely known as “ad tech.”

A lawyer for the advertiser class, Jordan Elias of San Francisco’s Girard Sharp, told Reuters on Thursday that “there is no burden to Google from giving private plaintiffs access to the documents it previously produced to government enforcers.”

The plaintiffs’ attorneys said in their filing that court orders “did not permit Google to comb over and reexamine its production to the state of Texas to decide for itself what was and was not ‘related to ad tech.’”

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