Archive - January 2005

Streamline Capital, LLC v. Hartford Cas. Ins. Co., 2005 WL 66898 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 11, 2005)

Previously, the defendant had sought sanctions for spoliation of evidence, arguing that plaintiff’s two principals (key witnesses in the case) had systematically deleted potentially relevant emails before and during the litigation. At that time, the magistrate judge deferred any decision on sanctions and ordered the two witnesses to consent to the production of pertinent emails still available through their email service companies in order to determine, to the extent possible, the degree of prejudice defendant suffered by virtue of the deletions. See Streamline Capital LLC v. Hartford Cas. Ins. Co., 2004 WL 2663564 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 19, 2004). The court ordered that any recovered emails be delivered to plaintiff’s counsel to review for privilege, and that the balance of the emails be produced to defendant. This most recent opinion addresses defendant’s motion to compel production of several of the recovered emails withheld by plaintiff as privileged.

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Burrell v. Anderson, 353 F.Supp.2d 55 (D. Me. 2005)

Plaintiff sued county and various employees of police department and attorney general’s office alleging due process, equal protection, First Amendment, and civil rights conspiracy claims stemming from incidents involving either plaintiff and his former girlfriend, or their daughter. Plaintiff contended that the defendant employees improperly responded or unacceptably failed to respond to these incidents because of gender-discriminatory attitudes and policies pertaining to domestic abuse. Read More

DirecTV, Inc. v. Borow, 2005 WL 43261 (N.D.Ill. Jan. 6, 2005)

In this case, the court granted summary judgment in favor of plaintiff DirecTV and against defendant Randy Borow on claims stemming from Borow’s unauthorized use of plaintiff’s satellite television signal. Summary judgment was warranted, in part, because defendant had not offered sufficient evidence to rebut the presumption that arose from his destruction of relevant evidence.

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In re Telxon Corp. Securities Litigation, 2004 WL 3192729 (N.D.Ohio July 16, 2004)

Recommending that default judgment on liability be entered against third party defendant, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, the judge stated “it would be difficult for anyone to argue that PWC’s conduct over the course of the litigation, particularly its repeated assurances to the court and to the parties that it had fully disclosed all relevant information, was not due to willfulness, bad faith or fault.” The judge criticized PWC for, among other things: failing at the start of discovery to check thoroughly its local servers and its archives for relevant documents, failing to produce documents as they were kept in the ordinary course of business, failing to reproduce thoroughly and accurately all documents and their attachments, and, prior to litigation, permitting the destruction of documents despite committing to their preservation. The court stated the only conclusion it can reach “is that PWC and/or its counsel engaged in deliberate fraud or was so recklessly indifferent to their responsibilities as a party to litigation that they failed to take the most basic steps to fulfill those responsibilities.”

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Nartron Corp. v. General Motors Corp., 2005 WL 26991 (Mich. Ct. App. Jan. 6, 2005) (unpublished)

In a prior appeal, the court affirmed the trial judge’s order granting summary judgment dismissing plaintiff’s breach of contract claim and dismissing with prejudice plaintiff’s remaining claims as a sanction for discovery abuses. See Nartron Corp. v. Gen. Motors Corp., 2003 WL 1985261 (Mich. Ct. App. Apr. 29, 2003) (unpublished). Thereafter, the trial court entered judgment ordering plaintiff to pay costs and sanctions in the amount of $2,442,440.97, representing $1,912,630.66 in attorneys’ fees, $159,542.10 in legal assistant fees, $361,641.71 in expert witness fees, and additional costs for the special discovery master. The trial court further ordered plaintiff to pay prejudgment interest in the amount of $1,708,515.77, for a total judgment of $4,150,956.24.

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Rowe Entm’t, Inc. v. The William Morris Agency, Inc., 2005 WL 22833 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 5, 2005)

The court recently granted summary judgment for the defendants in this seminal E-discovery cost-shifting case, having concluded that plaintiffs “raised no genuine issue of material fact and that no rational trier of fact could find for plaintiffs on any of the myriad of claims made in this action.” Plaintiffs were concert promoters who claimed that booking agencies and other promoters had engaged in discriminatory and anti-competitive practices.

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