WP Engine and Automattic Trade Accusations of Withheld Evidence in Flurry of Court Filings - The Repository

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WP Engine and Automattic Trade Accusations of Withheld Evidence in Flurry of Court Filings

Mullenweg sat for 21 hours of deposition. WP Engine wants 5 more hours. It’s one of six discovery fights the U.S. District Court is now considering.

Rae Morey

May 25, 2026

WP Engine and Automattic filed more than 20 discovery letters and motions with the U.S. District Court last week, each accusing the other of withholding evidence, obstructing the discovery process, and running out the clock.

The filings flooded the docket between May 20 and 22, a week after fact discovery closed in WP Engine’s lawsuit on May 14. They span at least six separate disputes covering Automattic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s deposition, the ACF plugin fork, WP Engine’s financial condition, trademark licensing, internal branding decisions, and the governance and finances of the WordPress Foundation.

Nearly every letter is accompanied by at least one motion to seal — a request to make certain court records unavailable to the public — so much of the substance of the claims is hidden behind redactions.

The filings mark the biggest single batch of discovery disputes since WP Engine filed its lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg in October 2024, and the court is moving quickly to deal with them. Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan, who is overseeing the discovery process, has set hearings for May 27 and 29, and indicated he will decide some of the disputes on the written submissions alone.

Deleted ACF user data and a 48-hour trail

The most substantive filing is a joint letter about Advanced Custom Fields-related documents, stemming from the April 10 deposition of Iain Poulson, WP Engine’s Principal Product Manager for the ACF plugin.

Automattic argues that Poulson confirmed under oath that several categories of business records exist in WP Engine’s systems — a monthly dashboard tracking ACF performance, a refund-reasons log, business intelligence reports, Google Analytics and Search Console data, annual user survey results, brand studies measuring reputational harm, and a Google Document underlying a deposition exhibit — but that WP Engine either never produced them or produced them incomplete and late.<br>ADVERTISEMENT

Automattic says some documents arrived at 11:25pm on May 14, during the final hour before fact discovery closed and after every witness had already been deposed.

WP Engine responded that the documents had either been produced, were privileged, or didn’t exist. But WP Engine also went on the offense, alleging that wordpress.org’s own systems had recorded identifying information about ACF plugin users — including IP addresses, site URLs, and hostnames — through callbacks, API requests, and "phone home" status checks. WP Engine argued that this data was stored on wordpress.org’s servers and then deleted on a rolling 48-hour cycle instead of being preserved.

The timing is central to WP Engine’s claims. ACF was forked on October 12, 2024, 10 days after WP Engine filed its lawsuit. That means user-identification data was being recorded and destroyed after Automattic’s obligations to preserve data in the case had already taken effect.

The accusation comes after Magistrate Judge Krishnan recently ordered Mullenweg to provide a sworn declaration about document preservation after describing Automattic’s efforts as "concerning."

WP Engine noted one more detail in its supporting declaration. At 11:34pm on May 21, the night before the joint letter was filed, Automattic’s lawyers emailed a proposed edit stating that the data was gone "in the ordinary course, long before WP Engine filed this lawsuit." WP Engine responded before the midnight filing deadline, but Automattic insisted on removing the statement. In her declaration, Quinn Emanuel attorney Kaitlin Koehane described it as an "admission" that Automattic sought to retract.

Automattic is separately seeking to seal the full deposition transcript of Barry Abrahamson, the company’s Chief Systems Wrangler, who testified about wordpress.org’s plugin data architecture, arguing his testimony includes proprietary business information whose disclosure would cause competitive harm.<br>ADVERTISEMENT

Twenty-one hours with Mullenweg and a request for more

According to the filings, Mullenweg sat for three days of deposition at Quinn Emanuel’s San Francisco offices from May 12 to 14. He answered more than 1,300 questions across 21 hours on the record, was examined by three attorneys, and was shown more than 80 exhibits. He had been designated as the person most knowledgeable on 46 topics — 29 for Automattic and 17 for WooCommerce — covering nearly all of WP Engine’s claims in the case.

WP Engine had requested five days of deposition with Mullenweg. When that request was refused, it asked for four, was turned down again,...