Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley speaks at a candid Federal Bar Association event highlighting some judges and court procedures.

A federal magistrate judge ordered Facebook and plaintiffs in a proposed class action stemming from the company's Cambridge Analytica scandal to regularly hop on video conference calls to squash an ongoing discovery dispute.

U.S. District Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the Northern District of California told Facebook's lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and plaintiffs counsel from Keller Rohrback and Bleichmar Fonti & Auld to meet and confer via video conferencing platform Zoom, not letters or email.

"Going forward I might order this in everything," said Corley during a hearing held via Zoom video conference Friday morning. Corley, who is overseeing discovery disputes in the multidistrict litigation pending before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California, noted that the method is working very well in the Juul multidistrict litigation, another case in which she is overseeing the discovery process.

In a status report filed Thursday, plaintiffs attorneys raised concerns about discovery of electronically stored information including disagreements over protocol, search terms and potential custodians. Gibson Dunn wrote in the filing that "Facebook has endured an escalating barrage of discovery letters," despite producing more than 250,000 pages of electronically stored information.

To expedite discovery, Chhabria earlier this year ordered Facebook to hand over documents related to inquiries from regulators such as the Federal Trade Commission that investigated claims the social network breached its privacy guidelines when Facebook apps gathered unauthorized data from users indirectly through friends.

The judge said the lawyers' status report was "a bit like two ships passing in the night," and she hopes the informal face-to-face communication will make it so "no one needs to feel like they're chasing the other down or getting bombarded."

Gibson Dunn's Orin Snyder suggested one of the meet and confers be "a cocktail zoom."

"That is an excellent suggestion. I would order that if I could," Corley said.

Cocktails or not, the judge did recommend keeping the Zoom meetings as friendly as possible.

"We're working hard, but we're distracted," she said. "Everyone doesn't know if their law firm is going to be here a year from now, or they have their kids running around behind them and they're trying to homeschool. There are things that are frankly bigger that are happening that we need to be conscious of," she said. "This is an unprecedented time, and we need to be understanding. Keep in mind that everyone is doing their best at this time."

Snyder said that it meant a lot for the judge to tell them they could "chill out a bit," and the judge affirmed that it was OK that Snyder and Gibson Dunn's Joshua Lipshutz were not wearing ties, an outfit choice the two lawyers had emailed about in advance, according to Snyder.

Keller Rohrback's Derek Loeser said, "I was kind of happy to put one on and make this seem like a normal week."