In this SGHC case of L’Oreal and another v Shopee Singapore Pte Ltd [2025] SGHCR 2, the applicants had successfully obtained pre-action discovery orders in respect of sellers on Shopee’s platform.

They went back to court arguing that Shopee failed to fully comply with the earlier disclosure order, seeking for Shopee to explain its user verification process, to obtain verified information of the sellers, to be restrained from disclosing to the sellers info about the proceedings, and to be permitted to inform the Ministry of Home Affairs of Shopee’s failure/inability to verify sellers’ identities against government-issued documentation.

Holdings

1. Shopee had complied with the earlier disclosure order to the best of its ability, noting that Shopee has provided sufficient info for the applicants’ needs, and had provided most of the info save only for a few categories for a few sellers.

2. Drawing from principles on sufficiency of interrogatories under the ROC 2014, in assessing if there is compliance with pre-action / non-party discovery orders under O 11 r 11, the court should not go behind affidavits unless it is plain and obvious that, inter alia, requested info/docs not produced exist(ed), were in the respondent’s possession/control, within the respondent’s knowledge/belief, is what the respondent bound to obtain, were essentially not disclosed having regard to the substance of the answers. The disclosure should be assessed as a whole and not on each piece of answer/info provided.

3. Compliance with pre-action discovery orders is a matter of sufficiency not truthfulness. Further, generally, a respondent ought only to obtain information from their employees/agents, and tt the court would not usually require non-parties to be unduly troubled by litigation involving others, considering the degree of intrusiveness on a non-party. In this case, the applicants’ requested further production order was deemed intrusive to an inordinate degree, effectively requiring Shopee to leverage its commercial relationships with the sellers to conduct further investigations.

4. The Riddick undertaking should not be lifted. While infringement of IP rights is serious, it does not rise to the level of public safety concerns. Even if it is true that Shopee did not verify identities of sellers against government-issued identity documentation (creating the risk of e-commerce scams), this is not nearly the same as a plan to commit heinous crimes. Further, the court did not think that Shopee had provided missing, bogus or unreliable information in its disclosure.

Comments & Takeaways

1. This is a good case study for developing and implementing a robust litigation strategy using third- or non-party discovery under O 11 r 11 of the ROC 2021. Given the onerous nature of such disclosure orders, the limitations on such orders and the assessment of sufficiency of disclosure require tailoring the right scope and terms to be sought.

2. Right holders, brand owners and other potential claimants seeking to identify defendants through pre-action / non-party discovery must be prepared for the possibility that info obtained may be incomplete, unverified, or insufficient. Alternative investigative methods may be required.

3. The decision implicitly reinforces the status of online platforms as intermediaries in the context of discovery obligations related to their users’ activities. While they must comply with valid production orders regarding existing records, the court was unwilling to impose duties akin to those of an investigator or guarantor of user data accuracy.

4. Another point of note is that the applicants had initially omitted to apply for a non-disclosure order against the respondent, to prevent the potential defendants from being alerted to the potential claims against them. Potential claimants and their counsels should generally consider the necessity of this when making pre-action / non-party discovery applications.