Case Summaries – Page 111 – Electronic Discovery Law

Balance Point Divorce Funding LLC v. Srantom, No. 13-cv-1049 (PKC), 2015 WL 997718 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 6, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Court approved taxation of costs related to TIFF conversion and ?uploading responsive documents through the use of a File Transfer Protocol,? but declined to allow costs related to ?Processing Initial Dataset,? ?Culling and Posting Resulting Data Subset,? ?Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Processing,? ?ID/Conversion of Non-searchable Docs to Searchable,? ?Project Management,? ?Hosting Active-Data,? and ?document unitization?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable e-Discovery costs

Mobile Telecomm. Techs., LLC v. Samsung Telecomm. Am., LLC, No. 2:13-cv-259-RSP, 2015 WL 5719123 (E.D. Tex. Sept. 28, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Court denied recovery of OCR costs where Defendant failed to show that the step was necessary for making copies, where no party had identified 5th Circuit authority allowing recovery of OCR costs, and where the holding was consistent with the Court?s standing order, which specifically instructed that e-Discovery costs were not allowed, including ?cost for document collection, document processing, and document hosting.?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Flanders v. Dzugan, No. 12-1481, 2015 WL 5022734 (W.D. Pa. Aug. 24, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Court declined to impose sanctions, despite Defendant?s failure to issue a litigation hold, where Plaintiff could not show that evidence was actually lost or destroyed and where, although the court acknowledged that Defendant?s record keeping appeared ?slipshod,? Plaintiff could not show bad faith (?in no case in the Third Circuit cited by Plaintiff, or found by this Court, has a court granted a spoliation inference on nothing more than a failure to institute a litigation hold?)

Nature of Case: [A]lleged constitutional violations arising out of the building permit approval process

Electronic Data Involved: ESI, email

United States v. Vaugh, No. 14-23 (JLL), 2015 WL 6948577 (D.N.J. Nov. 11, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: In this criminal case, a pro se defendant sought sanctions, including dismissal of the indictment, for the Government?s failure to preserve text messages relevant to its investigation. Upon examination of the facts, including the Government?s acknowledged failure to preserve certain texts and constantly changing explanations surrounding that failure as well as the ?different level of diligence? applied to different text messages (care was taken to preserve messages belonging to a cooperating witness), the court determined sanctions were warranted. Accordingly, the court ordered that the Government would be precluded from using any text messages in its case-in-chief and reserved judgement until trial regarding the propriety of an adverse inference instruction.

Nature of Case: Criminal

Electronic Data Involved: Text messages

Wilson v. Conair, No. 1:14-cv-00894-WBS-SAB, 2015 WL 1994270 (E.D. Cal. Apr. 30, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Although ?[t]he rules do not require a party to produce ESI in the form most helpful to the opposing party[,]? the court ordered Defendant to produce additional discovery in TIFF format and to produce the metadata for all documents already produced (in PDF format)

Nature of Case: Class action

Electronic Data Involved: ESI (.xls, proprietary format)

Forman v. Henkin, 134 A.D.3d 529 (N.Y. App. Div. 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Where trial court in personal injury case ordered production of all photos of plaintiff privately posted on Facebook prior to the accident that plaintiff intended to introduce at trial, all photos of plaintiff privately posted after the accident not involving nudity or ?romantic encounters? and authorizations for defendant to obtain records showing each time plaintiff posted a private message after the accident and the number of words in each post, the appellate court vacated those portions of the order directing production of post-accident photos not intended to be introduced at trial and authorizations related to the private messages

Nature of Case: Personal injury

Electronic Data Involved: Social media contents, Facebook

Document Security Systems, Inc. v. Coupons.com, Inc., 2015 WL 1189661 (W.D.N.Y. Mar. 16, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Cost of converting native email and other native files into imaged format for purposes of production was one of many items considered by the court in defendant?s application for costs following grant of summary judgment. Despite plaintiffs argument that the requested expenses should only be approved if they pertain to documents actually produced to Plaintiff, court was satisfied with defendant?s explanation that the costs were ?actually and necessarily incurred in responding to the Plaintiff?s discovery demands? and allowed recovery of defendant?s tiffing costs, even though Defendant could not ?state with certainty whether every document that was converted was actually turned over to Plaintiff as being responsive to a particular demand.?

Nature of Case: Breach of contract

Electronic Data Involved: Imaged native files

Burnett v. Ford Motor Co., No. 3:13?cv?14207, 2015 WL 1650439 (S.D. W. Va. April 14, 2015); Burd v. Ford Motor Co., No. 3:13?cv?20976, 2015 WL 1650447 (S.D. W. Va. April 14, 2015); Johnson v. Ford Motor Co., No. 3:13?cv?06529, 2015 WL 1650428 (S.D. W. Va. April 14, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Inadvertently produced ESI

Nature of Case: Product Liability

Bagwe v. Sedgwick Claims Mgmt. Servs., Inc., No. 11 CV 2450, 2015 WL 351244 (N.D. Ill. Jan. 27, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Regarding the taxation of e-Discovery costs, court found that costs ?associated with the conversion of ESI into a readable format, such as scanning or otherwise converting a paper version to an electronic version or converting native files to TIFF files … are compensable under ? 1920(4). But costs related to the ?gathering, preserving, processing, searching, culling, and extracting of ESI simply do not amount to ?making copies? and are thus not taxable.?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable e-Discovery Cost

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Cuker Interactive, LLC, NOo. 5:14-CV-5262, 2015 WL 11120890 (W.D. Ark. April 9, 2015)

Dec 01 2015

Key Insight: Where parties agreed to produce in native format but Defendant then loaded its information into a hosted database and indicated that Plaintiff could view the docs, including some metadata, but could only receive production of specified documents in a static image format, at a cost for each such ?exportation,? and where Defendant argued such production complied with Rule 26(f) and that the data was in a reasonably usable form, the court held the parties to their agreement, reasoning that ?[s]imply put, native format means native format? and also rejected Defendant?s security concerns, agreeing with Plaintiff that production on an external hard drive was acceptable; court?s order stated that parties would ?produce discovery from electronic or computer-based media directly to each other in native format, on external hard drives whenever possible.?

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Catagory:Case Summaries