SirsiDynix Seeks Dismissal of Most Charges Made by Queens Library

Suit enters discovery phase, as vendor asserts issue doesn't implicate industry but is basic contract dispute

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 11/2/2009

• Should complaint be narrowed, fewer industry implications
• Initial conference held this morning
• Discovery phase will last until June 4
• Vendor: it could take 500-700 hours to parse 70 terabytes

Responding to allegations filed in July by the Queens Library (QL) in federal court, ILS vendor SirsiDynix on October 26 filed a motion to dismiss five of the nine elements of the library's complaint (see below).

QL charged a bait-and-switch, in which the Horizon 8.0 system it sought from Dynix was not developed, as the company was merged with Sirsi, whose Unicorn system it had already rejected; instead, QL eventually chose a different vendor: VTLS. The elements of the complaint not challenged for immediate dismissal are breach of contract, fraud, breach of guaranty, and tortious interference with contract.

Contract revealed
To support its request for dismissal, SirsiDynix included the full text of the contract signed with QL, dated March 6, 2006 (also see below), which stated, among other things, that the library had waived claims to implied warranties and punitive damages. As Marshall Breeding notes in his Library Technology GuidePosts entry publicizing the documents, "[i]t’s rare to get a glimpse of a license agreement made by a library for a major library automation procurement, since in most cases these documents are considered proprietary and confidential."

The attempt to dismiss these five causes of action suggest a very different view by SirsiDynix in contrast to the broad allegations made by Queens, which charged fraud not just against itself, "but other libraries as well."

Indeed, the motion's preliminary statement concludes by calling the dispute "nothing more than a well-intentioned business venture which ultimately failed to meet the expectations of both parties. Plaintiff's attempts to transform this contract dispute into an elaborate fraudulent conspiracy must be rejected and plaintiff's legally insufficient claims and damages must be dismissed."

If the motion is successful, it would curtail the broader industry implications of the case.

When contacted last month about the case, SirsiDynix denied all the allegations and said that it had no further comment pending ongoing litigation.

Court conference
This morning, the two parties met at a preliminary conference before U.S. Magistrate Judge Ramon E. Reyes Jr. at the Eastern District of New York Federal Court in Brooklyn. Opposing lawyers mostly discussed issues of scheduling, and briefly touched on SirsiDynix's motion to dismiss.

Explaining the case to Reyes, Rebecca Brazzano, the attorney representing QL, summarized several points listed in the complaint. When asked about the product QL initially chose from Dynix, Brazzano described the deal as "almost a joint venture to develop specialized software," given the dozens of different languages Queens desired to have its ILS support.

Addressing the motion to dismiss, Brazzano said, "We filed the complaint July 2. Four months down the road, we have a partial motion to dismiss.... We see this very much as a delay tactic."

Discovery phase
The case now enters a roughly six-month discovery phase, in which depositions from key parties will be taken and documents relating to the case are made available to both sides. Both lawyers agreed that there would likely be several third-party depositions, given that a number of SirsiDynix executives at the time of the contract have since left the company, and that outside experts will be called upon to testify "on software issues and how the software ultimately utilized differs in function and cost," according to Jeffrey Rosenstein, representing SirsiDynix.

The parties are tentatively scheduled to reconvene after discovery on June 4, though Reyes conceded that he "could easily see things getting extended" after Rosenstein stated that SirsiDynix estimates that it could take 500-700 hours to sort through the estimated 70 terabytes of relevant data held by the company.

Contact the author: josh.hadro@reedbusiness.com