December 2004 – Page 9 – Electronic Discovery Law

U.S. v. Siddiqui, 235 F.3d 1318 (11th Cir. 2000)

Dec 01 2004

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

Edward D. Ioli Trust v. Avigilon Corp., No. 2:10-cv-605-JRG, 2012 WL 5830711 (E.D. Tex)

Dec 01 2004

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

GE Harris Ry. Elecs., LLC v. Westinghouse Air Brake Co., 2004 WL 5702740 (D. Del. Mar. 29, 2004)

Dec 01 2004

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

Vision Point of Sale, Inc. v. Haas, 2004 WL 5326424 (Ill. Cir. Ct. Sept. 27, 2004)

Dec 01 2004

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

Walker v. Cash Flow Consultants, Inc., 200 F.R.D. 613 (N.D. Ill. 2001)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: While granting without prejudice defendant’s motion to dismiss and denying without prejudice plaintiff’s motion to certify class, court found that plaintiff’s request for entry of a document preservation order was overbroad but not entirely unnecessary, and entered a more narrow document preservation order

Nature of Case: Class action alleging violations of Fair Debt Collection Practices Act

Electronic Data Involved: Computer information relating to defendant’s debt collection policies

ABC Health Servs., Inc. v. IBM Corp., 158 F.R.D. 180 (S.D. Ga. 1994)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Court denied plaintiff?s motion to dismiss IBM’s counterclaims as sanction for deletion of computer files, since erasure was done before suit was filed and did not amount to willful or bad faith disregard of discovery order or discovery request; court indicated that a jury instruction regarding destruction of documents may be an appropriate lesser sanction

Nature of Case: Breach of contract for development of software

Electronic Data Involved: Computer files containing both project-related documents and purely personal documents

Schnall v. Annuity and Life RE (Holdings), Ltd., 2004 WL 51117 (D. Conn. Jan. 2, 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Where defendants had actual notice of allegations against them and affirmatively stated that they were fully aware of their preservation obligations under PSLRA and sanctions for failure to comply, court declined to enter preservation order

Nature of Case: Securities litigation

Electronic Data Involved: Documents, data compilations (including electronically recorded or stored data), and tangible objects

IKON Office Solutions, Inc. v. Knapp, 2002 WL 34372446 (D. Wyo. July 12, 2002)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Plaintiff ordered to produce portions of database relied upon by its expert for 24 customers at issue in the litigation; but plaintiff need not produce or disclose remainder of 790-customer database unless otherwise ordered by the court

Nature of Case: Business litigation

Electronic Data Involved: Customer data

Drnek v. Variable Annuity Life Ins. Co., 2004 WL 1098919 (D. Ariz. May 4, 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Sanctions not warranted where plaintiffs made ?tenuous allegation? without any specific evidentiary support that defendants had implemented a new email document retention policy after litigation was commenced and that potentially relative emails may have been destroyed pursuant to the policy

Nature of Case: Claimed violations of the anti-fraud provisions of the Securities and Exchange Acts

Electronic Data Involved: Email

Dean v. Priceline.com, Inc., 2002 WL 34155897 (D. Conn. Sept. 10, 2002)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Court ordered defendant to produce to plaintiff information in the possession of a third party storage facility, with each side paying one-half of the charges billed by the third party for retrieving the information; court further ruled that the prevailing party would be entitled to recover from the losing party its share of the costs associated with retrieval of the information

Nature of Case: FLSA claim

Electronic Data Involved: Electronic documents

Archive - December 2004