A judge rejects Apple’s last-minute request to extend the deadline in the Epic case

Apple tried at the last second to get out of producing dozens of documents Monday as ordered in its ongoing dispute with Epic, and Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson is having none of it. In early August, the company was given a September 30 deadline to produce documents related to this year, which was its attempt to meet the ban. Apple initially told the court that the project would involve reviewing approximately 650,000 documents – but in a status report on Thursday, it said the number had increased to more than 1.3 million, and asked for a two-week extension. Hixson rejected the request on Friday in the strongest terms he saw and called Apple’s move “misconduct.”

Apple and Epic have been submitting joint status reports to the court every two weeks, and the issue of Apple’s documents exceeding its previous estimates has never come up before, the judge noted. “This information would have been known to Apple weeks ago,” Hixson said in the order. “It is unbelievable that Apple learned about this information two weeks after the last status report.” The judge said the request raises other concerns, questioning the quality of Apple’s reports and its intentions regarding timeliness. Apple has “almost infinite resources” it could use to get a job done in a given amount of time, according to Hixson.

“This is classic moral hazard,” Hixson said in the story, “and the way Apple announced outside of four days before the big deadline that it wouldn’t meet that deadline because of the number of documents it knew about. Many weeks doesn’t make it feel like Apple is behaving well.” “