December 1, 2012 – Electronic Discovery Law

MGA Entm?t, Inc. v. Nat?l Prods. Ltd., No. CV 10-07083 JAK (SSx), 2012 WL 12886446 (C.D. Cal. Jan. 26, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Plaintiffs sought to compel production of responsive documents relating to Defendant?s sale of products carrying the Little Tikes brand. Defendant had attached documents to its opposition motion that it had not previously produced to Plaintiff, which prompted the current motion. Plaintiffs requested that Defendant ?identify all custodians of documents referring or relating to Defendant?s sale? and conduct a ?forensic analysis of all Defendants? document custodians? to locate responsive documents. The court denied Plaintiff?s request for a forensic analysis, noting ?that the motion is based only on speculation and lacks conclusive proof that responsive documents are actually being withheld.? However the court found that Defendant?s ESI searching ?may have been inadequate? and were performed ?without guidance or supervision from an attorney on how to conduct a search.? The court ordered a meet and confer to identify custodians and agree on search terms, the Defendant must then perform the searches of ESI on Defendants’ computers/systems (supervised by an attorney who must then submit a declaration) and produce responsive documents.

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Mailhoit v. Home Depot USA, No. CV 11-03892 DOC (SSx), 2012 WL 12884128 (C.D. Cal. Aug. 29, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Addressing Defendant?s Motion for an order precluding discovery of disaster recovery backup tapes, court considered the factors laid out in Rule 26(b)(2)(B)?s Committee Note (2006) and relevant case law and concluded that Defendant met its burden to establish inaccessibility where restoration and production would be ?extraordinarily expensive, both in restoration costs and attorney time? and that Plaintiff failed to establish good cause to compel production, citing as most important the failure to substantiate the claim that the emails would be important or useful to her case; court rejected argument that sampling must be conducted before a cost-benefit analysis could be undertaken by the court

Electronic Data Involved: Disaster Recovery Backup Tapes

MC Asset Recovery LLC v. Castex Energy, Inc., NO. 4:07-CV-076-Y, 2012 WL 12919263 (N.D. Tex. April 26, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Court acknowledged that the parties could have communicated better to resolve the issue, but granted Plaintiff?s motion to compel re-production of ESI in .tiff format with a summation load file (including metadata) where Plaintiff indicated issues with Defendant?s production but where Defendant failed to timely follow up and then voluntarily re-produced ESI but not in a format that included metadata; the court also noted the strong showing that the metadata would be useful in the case and Plaintiff?s willingness to substantially narrow the number of documents sought, thus reducing the burden of production

Electronic Data Involved: ESI with metadata

Lechase Constr. Servs. LLC v. Info. Advantage, Inc., NO. 2011/7765, 2012 WL 12294457 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Oct. 4, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Court granted Plaintiff?s request for an order approving the use of key words to locate responsive documents and instructed that if Plaintiff and/or its counsel was capable of searching both email and attachments, they may proceed with ?self-collection? but that if they could not, a vendor would be required to run the searches; court encouraged cooperation in determining keywords to be utilized

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Blythe v. Bell, No. 11 CVS 933, 2012 WL 3061862 (N.C. Sup. Ct. July 26, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Where defendants hired an inexperienced vendor/consultant to identify potentially responsive ESI using search terms provided by plaintiffs and produced 3.5 million documents (which included privileged information) without further review save the attempted removal of documents containing the ?hickorylaw.com? extension (which proved unsuccessful), the court acknowledged a five-factor test to analyze the question of waiver, indicated the question of whether reasonable precautions were taken was controlling, and found that privilege had been waived where defendants’ efforts to guard against waiver were insufficient, particularly in light of the high volume of ESI which should have prompted more diligent efforts; court considered whether waiver was appropriate where defendants sought assistance from an outside consultant but found that counsel?s supervision of that consultant was insufficient: ?But, the court also concludes that efforts by a consultant demand a degree of oversight that is absent here.?

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Pacificorp v. N.W. Pipeline GP, No. 3:10-cv-00099-PK, 2012 WL 6131558 (D. Or. Dec. 10, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Addressing issue of taxable costs related to electronic discovery, court allowed recovery of costs related to ?converting already selected files into a database,? bates stamping, conversion to searchable PDF, and storage of electronic data but denied recovery as to collecting documents and culling them for responsiveness

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs related to ESI

Abbot Point of Care, Inc. v. Epocal, Inc., No. CV-08-S-543-NE, 2012 WL 7810970 (N.D. Ala. Nov. 5, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Court declined to allow recovery of costs related to maintenance of an electronic discovery database but allowed recovery of costs related to ?processing of electronic documents, including conversion of native files to ?TIFF? format for production to Abbott; conversion of document[s] from ?TIFF? format to a searchable format; importing and loading of documents to an electronic database; production of electronic documents; and the associated project and technical support?

Electronic Data Involved: ESI taxable costs

ADT Secs. Servs. Inc. v. Pinnacle Sec. LLC, No. 10 C 7467, 2012 WL 7170633 (N.D. Ill. May 11, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Where defendant argued that its failure to issue a specific litigation hold was mitigated by prior imposition of a no-delete policy which would have prevented any loss of evidence, the court determined it needed additional information on the scope of the policy and ordered defendant to provide information to determine if the scope of the policy was sufficiently broad and how it was communicated to employees; where defendant acknowledged that it did not search certain individual computers because all files created were to be saved in the ?My Documents? folder which was saved to a network server, the court noted the lack of assurance that employees followed the default settings and that they did not save ESI in folders outside of ?My Documents? and thus ordered a search of particular employees? computers using Plaintiff?s key word search terms

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Hanwha Azdel, Inc. v. C&D Zodiac, Inc., No. 6:12-cv-00023, 2012 WL 6726412 (W.D. Va. Dec. 27, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: Where Defendant produced forty gigabytes of material on a single memory stick organized into folders by search term, with no other organization by custodian or otherwise, court noted that ?[o]rganizing a production to reflect how the information is kept ?in the usual course of business? sometimes requires the producing party to include different identifying information according to the type of document or file produced,? and that ?[e]mails specifically are produced in the usual course of business when responsive emails are arranged ?by custodian, in chronological order and with attachments, if any?? and found that the production was not in an appropriate format in this case; court ordered Defendant to bear the costs to convert the ESI into a readily usable format (estimated to be $8,463.00)

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Navajo Nation v. United States, —Fed. Cl.—, 2012 WL 5398792 (Fed. Cl. Nov. 6, 2012)

Dec 01 2012

Key Insight: To settle disagreement between the parties, court entered discovery order addressing several issues including format of production, categories of ESI presumptively exempt from discovery absent a showing of good cause, and inadvertent production, among others

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Archive - December 1, 2012