Who You Givin’ Only One Star?

Yelp Inc. v. Superior Court, No. G054358 (D4d3 Nov. 13, 2017)

Discovery of anonymous poster information from Internet companies has been a hot topic in Court of Appeal lately. In the past year or so, there’s been a case about Google, and a pair of cases involving Glassdoor. This time it’s Yelp.

Following the first Glassdoor case—the court finds that Yelp had standing to raise its customer’s interest in remaining anonymous, because Yelp’s ability to maintain its reviewers anonymity is part and parcel of its very business. But then following the test from the second Glassdoor case, the court finds that the plaintiff has nonetheless made a sufficient prima facie showing of defamation to get at the information. So the court affirms the trial court’s order to produce the info. It reverses, however, on discovery sanctions. Given that the Glassdoor cases were decided after the trial court’s order, the issues presented in the dispute were novel enough that Yelp’s arguments in resisting the discovery were substantially justified.

Writ denied, sanctions order reversed.