District Court Modifies Magistrate Judge’s Order Requiring Production of Forensically Sound Copies of Defendant’s Servers to Allow for Pre-Production Privilege Review
Bro-Tech Corp. v. Thermax, Inc., 2008 WL 724627 (E.D. Pa. Mar. 17, 2008)
In this case involving claims of misappropriation of trade secrets, defendants objected to an order of a magistrate judge requiring them to disclose "forensically sound" images of certain data storage devices (Thermax’s India and Michigan servers) to plaintiffs’ counsel without any limitation as to the scope of the disclosure or prior filtering for privileged or work-product materials that the images might hold. The production was required to permit a determination of whether defendants had violated an earlier stipulation and order that had imposed an ongoing obligation on defendants to return to plaintiffs any of plaintiffs’ files in their possession, and then to purge such files from their possession, custody and/or control.
The magistrate judge’s order had issued in the context of a dispute around the deposition of Stephen Wolfe, an employee of Huron Consulting Group, a computer forensic services firm relied on by defendants for both testifying and consultative expert work. Wolfe testified that, at Thermax’s direction, he had performed two distinct tasks. The first was to produce an expert report regarding whether an array of plaintiff’s information identified by plaintiff’s expert was located on a discrete set of data storage devices, after performing all necessary searches of images of the devices. This set of devices did not include the India or Michigan servers. The second task was to conduct electronic searches of images of Thermax’s India and Michigan servers for evidence of plaintiff’s files therein (which, in accordance with the parties’ earlier stipulation and order, already should have been disclosed to plaintiffs and purged). The two tasks were different in several ways, as each task involved searches of different devices, with the searches involved in the former task providing the exclusive basis of Wolfe’s expert report, and the searches of the India and Michigan servers not informing his report in any respect. In other words, Wolfe performed the former task in his capacity as a testifying expert, and performed the latter task in his capacity as a consulting expert.