Key Insight: Court did not abuse discretion in denying request for computer tapes where requesting party already possessed all information from tapes on wage cards and were not deprived of any data
Electronic Data Involved: Computer tapes containing wage information
Key Insight: Court ruled that plaintiff should determine, either informally or during a corporate deposition of defendant, what information responsive to interrogatory could be retrieved from defendant?s computer system and what could only be retrieved manually; to the extent the information could only be retrieved manually, parties were ordered to attempt to agree on a sampling process
Electronic Data Involved: Computer databases
Key Insight: Concluding that plaintiff’s discovery abuse warranted sanctions, district court ruled that appropriate sanction would be to inform the jury about plaintiff’s misconduct, since monetary sanctions previously imposed had not deterred further misconduct and extreme sanction of dismissal was not warranted by the facts
Electronic Data Involved: Breach of distributorship agreement, fraud, unfair trade practices and related torts
Key Insight: Magistrate recommended that non-parties’ motion for attorneys’ fees and other costs incurred in appearing for depositions and responding to subpoenas be denied, since non-parties failed to object to subpoenas or condition compliance on reimbursement, and an award of $58,000, without notice to plaintiffs, would be tantamount to severe prejudice
Electronic Data Involved: Email and hard copy documents
Key Insight: Adopting Zubulake and McPeek approaches, court ordered defendant to restore a sampling of five backup tapes selected by the plaintiff; parties would thereafter be required to make additional submissions addressing whether the burden or expense of satisfying the entire request was proportionate to the likely benefit
Electronic Data Involved: Email stored on backup tapes
Key Insight: Scheduling and case management order provides, inter alia, that document requests shall be responded to and documents produced within ten days after service, and that parties will produce documents in either hard copy form, or, in the case of electronic documents, in the native electronic format (or a mutually agreeable format)
Key Insight: District court did not abuse its discretion in ruling that an email was adequately authenticated by, among other things, the presence of defendant?s email address and the context and content of the email and was ?within its discretion? to deny hearsay objections to the introduction of the email because it was both an admission by a party AND was not hearsay in the first place where it was admitted to show the correspondents?? ?relationship and custom of communicating by e-mail.?
Nature of Case: Fraud, false statements to a federal agency, and obstruction of a federal investigation
Electronic Data Involved: Email
Key Insight: Court found that local Patent Rule 3-4(a) requires production of source code and granted Plaintiff?s motion to compel
Nature of Case: Patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: Source Code
Key Insight: Court declined to impose terminating sanctions and instead ordered an adverse inference sanction against defendant for employee?s intentional spoliation of electronic evidence where the destruction was motivated by an intent to eliminate incriminating evidence but where the prejudice was minimal in light of plaintiff?s ability to obtain copies of the deleted evidence by other means
Nature of Case: Patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets
Electronic Data Involved: ESI, emails
Key Insight: Court provided direction to parties for implementing injunction, ordering among other things: (1) defendant to obtain new computers of its choice and at its expense to replace all existing computers and servers; (2) defendant to choose which files would be transferred to new computers; (3) plaintiff?s expert to observe copying and transfer, and examine new computers to confirm they do not contain plaintiff?s data; (4) after transfer, defendant?s old computers to be stored and kept available for forensic discovery, the cost of which would be borne 75% by defendant and 25% by plaintiff, except that plaintiff?s expert fees to date to be divided evenly between plaintiff and defendant
Nature of Case: Misappropriation of proprietary information
Electronic Data Involved: 30 computers and 2 servers of defendant
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