Archive - March 2011

Green v. Blitz U.S.A., No. 2:07-CV-372 (TJW), 2011 WL 806011 (E.D. Tex. Mar. 1, 2011)

Plaintiff sought to re-open her lawsuit or for the court to sanction defendant, despite prior settlement, upon learning that defendant had failed to produce highly relevant documents.  Finding that defendant had committed discovery abuses, including failing to disclose relevant evidence and failing to issue a litigation hold, the court ordered defendant to pay plaintiff $250,000, to provide a copy of the court’s order to plaintiffs “in every lawsuit proceeding against it” for the past two years and to file the court’s order in every case that defendant is involved in for the next 5 years.

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Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC v. Trading Techs. Int’l, No. 05 C 4088, 2011 WL 722467 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 23, 2011)

In this case, the court ordered default judgment, ordered plaintiff to pay $1,000,000 in monetary sanctions, and ordered counsel to pay “the costs and attorneys fees incurred in litigating this motion” where plaintiff’s agent modified metadata related to relevant source code and wiped several relevant disks and devices prior to their production and where the court found counsel participated in “presenting misleading, false information, materially altered evidence and willful non-compliance with the Court’s orders.”

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Philips Elecs. N. Am. Corp. v. BC Tech., No. 2:08-CV-639-CW-SA, 2010 WL 5838993 (D. Utah July 28, 2010);  Philips Elecs. N. Am. Corp. v. BC Tech., No. 2:08-CV-639-CW-SA, 2011 WL 677462 (D. Utah Feb. 16, 2011)

In this case, the court imposed terminating sanctions against defendant after finding that five employees had destroyed “thousands of computer files” in bad faith prior to the production of their laptops for examination and that defendant had attempted to hide those deletions from plaintiffs and the court.

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Fed. Trade Comm’n v. First Univ. Lending, LLC, No. 09-82322-CIV, 2011 WL 673879 (S.D. Fla. Feb. 17, 2011)

Relevant data was lost when a group of computers was scrubbed and sold by defendants with the permission of the court-appointed Receiver.  The permission was given, on the condition that the computers were scrubbed, because of the Receiver’s mistaken belief that all relevant computers had been imaged.  As a result of the loss of data, defendants filed a motion for spoliation sanctions for what they described as “the FTC’s bad-faith destruction of Defendants’ computer systems.”  For the reasons discussed below, defendants’ motion was denied.

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Moreno v. Ostly, No. A127780, 2011 WL 598931 (Cal. Ct. App. Feb. 22, 2011)

After initially resisting discovery, plaintiff produced a laptop and cellular phone for examination.  Upon inspection, it was discovered that neither device was in use during the relevant time period.  Moreover, the relevant devices were no longer in plaintiff’s possession.  When challenged as to why this was not disclosed initially, counsel explained that he was torn between his “competing duties” of protecting his client and candor to the court.  Rejecting plaintiff’s and her counsel’s explanations, the court entered monetary sanctions against them.  On appeal, the sanctions were affirmed.

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