The underlying dispute centers on Mi A Lowe, a former chef at Mao Izakaya & Sushi LLC, who worked at the restaurant during two stints in 2022 and 2023. Lowe and roughly 60 other hourly employees are putative class members in a wage-theft suit filed in the Northern District of California. After Lowe obtained a $50,000 settlement in prior state court litigation against the restaurant and its owners — Anthony An and Myeong Rang Kim — she alleges the defendants refused to honor it and instead launched a scheme to put assets out of reach. That scheme, according to Lowe, involved transferring the restaurant business to a second group of defendants and initiating what she characterizes as a sham divorce proceeding between An and Kim to freeze their assets. She further alleges that defendants transmitted forged court documents, including a fabricated divorce certificate, to feign insolvency.
United States District Judge Beth Labson Freeman denied the motion for expedited discovery without prejudice on April 21, 2026, walking through each factor of the Ninth Circuit's good-cause standard.
On the forgery allegations — Lowe's central argument for urgency — the court reviewed the exhibits and did not find them to be obviously falsified. The court also noted that Kim had attached a restraining order to her opposition, demonstrating that the relationship between Kim and An is likely legitimately adversarial rather than a ruse. The court concluded that Lowe's submissions gave no reason to believe the parties would not comply with their obligations to preserve potentially relevant evidence.
The court also found the proposed discovery plan far from narrowly tailored. Lowe sought seven interrogatories, seven document requests, and third-party discovery across a broad list of categories. Among the interrogatories, for example, she proposed requesting all cash and credit card revenues of the restaurant without identifying any date range or explaining why that information would be relevant to the alleged hiding of assets. The proposed response window was only 21 days. The court found that the breadth of the proposed discovery plan weighed against good cause, as did the absence of a pending preliminary injunction motion.
The one factor that cut in Lowe's favor was timing: the Rule 26(f) conference is not scheduled until July 23, 2026, making the gap more than three months, which the court said weighed slightly toward good cause. That was not enough to tip the balance.
The court denied the motion without prejudice, leaving open the possibility of a more narrowly tailored renewed request.