Judge shapes evidence order in Edison wildfire case

The judge presiding over the Eaton Canyon wildfire litigation in Los Angeles was mostly successful on Wednesday in crafting "the broadest possible" equipment preservation order sought by plaintiffs without making Southern California Edison's repair efforts "untenable." However, she could not get the parties to agree on a testing protocol for powerlines that need to be reenergized, so she gave them a week to find a way forward.

Edison's attorneys say that an overly broad preservation order hampers their ability to get their grid fully up and running again. Summer is around the corner, and the utility will need capacity and redundancies to handle increased load. But the plaintiffs' attorneys fear that Edison will tamper with evidence pointing at its culpability in the wildfires that destroyed large tracts of Altadena and displaced thousands.

Scores of lawsuits have been filed against Edison since the wildfires broke out on Jan. 7. Most of those actions have been related and temporarily stayed pending a March 17 case management conference.

Judge Laura A. Seigle wishes to avoid a discovery battle early on, so she is pushing the parties in the one active case to agree on an evidence preservation order that would be in effect until March 17.

Their proposed order has 11 terms, with disagreements over seven of them, mostly over specific language. Seigle managed to work through most of the disagreements and ordered the parties to return Feb. 5 with a proposed testing protocol. Iglesias v. Southern California Edison Company et al., 25NNCV00200 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed, Jan. 13, 2025).

"Maybe this is a bad idea and that's fine - tell me it's a bad idea," Seigle said to the parties. "The concern here is, what if there is an emergency, what if tomorrow defendant determines that the whole system is going to go down if they don't energize the line, and about 100,000 people are going to lose electricity. That's what I'm concerned about," she continued.

"And then in an ideal world defendant doesn't need to reenergize and we go forward, and the system is stable, and it doesn't need to be reenergized. But in the non-ideal world, where they do need to, at least we've got that test done and we've got this baseline. Now, a month from now, we might have other plaintiffs involved and they say, well, we want to do that test ... And they might have to rerun it again. Would that be a bad thing?" Seigle said.

"I hate telling the court her idea is bad," Douglas J. Dixon began. Dixon is a partner with Hueston Hennigan LLP and leads Edison's defense.

"No, you tell me it's bad. Look, I don't know this world at all, so I'm just trying to come up with ideas and understand how this all works," Seigle responded.

"It would be, your honor," Dixon replied.

"Why?"

"Because that would require the deenergization again," Dixon said.

"But that's what I don't get, because the idea is ... it's only going to be energized if there is an emergency," Seigle said.

"Your honor, let me be very clear," Dixon said. "We need to reenergize these lines as soon as possible and at the absolute latest by May 1st due to increase in the loads and demands on towers."

"That makes sense. That totally makes sense. What I'm trying to do is short term," Seigle said "I'm talking about within the next three weeks."

Plaintiffs' counsel Ali Moghaddas suggested that Edison begin the testing process because it takes 24 days to get approval from a state agency, CAISO, which manages the state's electric system. Moghaddas is a partner with Edelson PC.

Dixon responded that other parties were involved, such as the California Public Utilities Commission.

"So, if we can get the court's blessing on a protocol saying that it would bind everyone so that we can move forward, we're prepared to move forward expeditiously," Dixon said.

Moghaddas suggested they confer with the defendants and other plaintiffs' counsel and return with a workable protocol in a week.

"If we have disagreement we'll be back before your honor to do this unfortunate exercise, but hopefully we can agree to something and then start those tests immediately," Moghaddas said.