Author - kgates

Gatto v. United Air Lines, Inc., No. 10-cv-1090-ES-SCM, 2013 WL 1285285 (D.N.J. Mar. 25, 2013)

In this personal injury action, the court imposed spoliation sanctions for Plaintiff’s failure to preserve his Facebook account.

Plaintiff alleged that as the result of a work-related accident he sustained numerous injuries that rendered him permanently disabled.  Defendants sought production of information related to Plaintiff’s social media accounts and online business activities such as eBay.  In response, Plaintiff provided signed authorizations for the release of information from certain sites, but did not include authorization for the release of records from Facebook.

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In re Coventry Healthcare, Inc. ERISA Litig., No. AW 09-2661, 2013 WL 1187909 (D. Md. Mar. 21, 2013)

In this brief opinion, the court considered Defendants’ claim that the burden of producing the requested ESI outweighed its potential benefit to the class action plaintiffs and granted Plaintiffs’ motion to compel.  Specifically, Defendants claimed that Plaintiffs’ search terms, as applied to the ESI of selected custodians from the relevant discovery time frame, “hit” on approximately 200,000 documents and that it would cost approximately $388,000 “to process host and review the data for responsiveness and privilege.”  Defendants did not, however, suggest alternative measures to accommodate Plaintiffs’ discovery needs “other than negotiating more refined search terms.” 

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EEOC v. The Original Honeybaked Ham Co. of Georgia, Inc., No. 11-cv-02560-MSK-MEH (D. Colo. Feb. 27, 2013)

Previously in this case, the court ordered broad discovery of the claimants’ social media, text messages and email.  (See a summary of that opinion, here.)  In this opinion, the court imposed sanctions for the EEOC’s actions which resulted in unnecessary delays and expense for the defendant, including actions related to the facilitation of the court ordered discovery.  Notably, the sanctions were imposed pursuant to Rule 16(f), based on the Tenth Circuit’s “broader” interpretation of its application.

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Juster Acquisition Co., LLC v. N. Hudson Sewerage Auth., No. 12-3427 (JLL), 2013 WL 541972 (D.N.J. Feb. 11, 2013)

In this case, the court denied Defendant’s motion for a protective order “regarding the sixty-seven (67) electronic word searches” demanded by the plaintiff.  It also denied Defendant’s request that the cost of running those searches be shifted to the plaintiff.

Plaintiff’s first Request for Production included a list of 67 proposed search terms to be run against Defendant’s ESI.  In response, Defendant sought a protective order or, alternatively, an order shifting the costs associated with the search, arguing it was “entitled” to a protective order because it had already produced 8000 pages of responsive documents (in hard copy) and because, in its view, the requested search terms were “quite broad and vague.”

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Gabriel Techs., Corp. v. Qualcomm, Inc., No. 08CV1992 AJB (MDD), 2013 WL 410103 (S.D. Cal. Feb. 1, 2013)

Following entry of judgment in their favor in this patent infringement case, Defendants filed a motion seeking attorneys’ fees, including $391,928.91 for document review conducted by an outside provider of discovery services and $2,829,349.10 “attributable to computerassisted [sic], algorithm-driven document review” utilized to reduce the number of documents requiring manual review.  The court found these amounts reasonable and granted the motion in part.  Ultimately, the court awarded Defendants a total of $12,465,331.01.

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Optiver Australia Pty. Ltd. & Anor. v. Tibra Trading Pty. Ltd. & Ors., No. C 12-80242 EJD (PSG), 2013 WL 256771 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 23, 2013)

In this case, the court granted in part Defendant’s Motion to Quash upon finding that Google’s production of metadata related to communications containing certain search terms and production of subject lines would violate the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”).

Before the court in this case was “the persnickety, but persistent, question of exactly what qualifies as ‘content,’ whose disclosure by service providers is prohibited under the Stored Communications Act.”  Specifically, the court considered Defendant’s motion to quash a subpoena served by the plaintiff upon Google, Inc. to obtain discovery for use in a foreign proceeding.  The subpoena sought information related to “a number of electronic communications sent or received by certain Gmail accounts allegedly used by employees of Tibra,” including metadata related to messages containing certain search terms and the subject lines of those messages and others which met certain criteria (e.g. sent within a certain time frame, received by certain people).

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