Apple tried at the last second to avoid filing a slew of documents by Monday, as ordered in its ongoing dispute with Epic, and Judge Thomas Hixson wouldn't allow it. In early August, the company was given a deadline of September 30 to submit documents related to this year, which was its attempt to satisfy a court order. Apple initially told the court that the task would involve reviewing approximately 650,000 documents, but in a status report on Thursday it said the number had ballooned to more than 1.3 million and asked for a two-week extension. Hixson denied the request Friday in a strongly worded statement. seen by and called Apple's move “bad behavior.”
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 estimate has never arisen before, the judge noted. “This information would have been apparent to Apple weeks ago,” Hixson said in the order. “It is simply not credible that Apple learned of this information only in the two weeks following the last status report.” The judge said the request raises other concerns, questioning the quality of Apple's reporting and its intentions to comply in a timely manner. Apple has “nearly infinite resources” that it could have harnessed to accomplish the task in the allotted time, according to Hixson.
“This is a classic moral hazard,” Hixson said in the order, “and the way Apple announced out of the blue, four days before the substantial completion deadline, that it would miss that deadline due to a document count. of which he surely had knowledge.” “For weeks there is hardly any impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.”
