Catagory:Case Summaries

West v. Talton, No. 5:13-cv-338 (CAR), 2015 WL 6675565 (M.D. Ga. Nov. 2, 2015)

In this case, the court granted Defendants’ motion to exclude “Plaintiff’s use of any argument or evidence of alleged spoliation” where, despite Defendants’ failure to preserve emails from an individual defendant, they were nonetheless able to locate the relevant defendant’s “old computer” and to hire a third party to search for and recover relevant emails and documents from the same.  Thus, the court found that Plaintiff failed to establish prejudice.

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Cook v. Tarbert Logging, Inc., —P.3d—, 2015 WL 5771329 (Wash. Ct. App. Oct. 1, 2015)

In this case, Plaintiffs failed to preserve the pickup truck involved in the at-issue accident, including the airbag control monitor (ACM), despite first allowing their own expert to inspect it.  To address the loss, Plaintiffs’ expert was precluded from testifying as to his opinion regarding the drivers’ speed and ultimately was not called as a witness.  Defendants were allowed to present evidence regarding Plaintiffs’ failure to preserve and to inform the jury of the expert’s inspection.  This created the false inference that the expert’s conclusions were unfavorable to the plaintiffs, which the plaintiffs were not permitted to rebut (the expert had in fact concluded that Plaintiff had been travelling at a “slower and safer speed” than the defendant at the time of the accident).  On appeal, the court determined that the trial court “erred in concluding that Washington has recognized a general duty to preserve evidence; it has not.”  The court also concluded that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing Defendants to tell the jury about the expert and his inspection without also allowing rebuttal from the plaintiffs.  Accordingly, the court reversed the case in part and remanded for a new trial.

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You v. Japan, No. C 15-03257 WHA, 2015 WL 5542539 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 16, 2015)

In this case, the court entered an order requiring preservation, including “interdiction of any document-destruction programs and any ongoing erasures of e-mails, voice mails, and other electronically-recorded material.”  In the course of its business, one defendant, the publisher of a daily newspaper, employed a proprietary application “used for laying out each edition of the newspaper.”  The application retained a “back catalog” of 90 days.  In response to the court’s order, the defendant alleged that retention of the application’s contents for longer than 90 days could “slow down the system or cause it to crash” and that although it could install a new storage system, it would cost $18 million and could take up to eight months.  Accordingly Defendant sought permission to employ certain search terms to be run across the application twice monthly to identify articles to be preserved.  Defendant alleged that it had “already run several searches using [the proposed] terms and found they yielded duplicative results,” but indicated it would use the terms “out of an abundance of caution.”  Defendant further explained that because the proposal “would not cease ‘all ongoing erasures of electronically-stored material,’” it sought court approval for its proposed method.

Plaintiffs opposed the proposal and argued that it could lead to the destruction of “evidence of [Defendant’s] state of mind in selecting and editing its articles” which could be relevant to Plaintiffs’ claims of defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.  Plaintiffs also identified an additional search term that the defendant had not proposed.

With the addition of Plaintiffs’ proposed term, the court found Defendant’s proposal “sufficiently broad” to identify and preserve potentially relevant articles and granted permission for Defendant’s proposed preservation protocol.

A copy of the court’s order is available here.

United States ex rel Guardiola v. Renown Health, No. 3:12-cv-00295-LRH-VPC, 2015 WL 5056726 (D. Nev. Aug. 25, 2015)

In this case, the court addressed Defendants’ claim that emails stored on backup tapes were not reasonably accessible because of undue burden and cost.  Reasoning that “[a]t bottom there will be a burden or a cost, but not both,” the court found that Defendants failed to show undue burden because of their stated intention to rely on a third party vendor, thus reducing the burden of in-house production by adding some cost and that, after disallowing consideration of the cost of document review and storage, the estimated $136,000 for restoration was not sufficient to render the emails inaccessible.  In so finding, the court reasoned that Defendants must bear some responsibility for the consequences of the decision to use an “archival/backup solution that did not maintain ESI in an indexed or otherwise searchable manner.”  The court also found good cause to compel production and that cost shifting was not warranted.

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New Orleans Reg’l Physician Hosp. Org., Inc. v. United States, —Fed. Cl.—, 2015 WL 5000512 (Fed. Cl. Aug. 21, 2015)

In this breach of contract case, Plaintiff sought an order requiring Defendant to “redo its searches for responsive documents according to parameters to be agreed upon by the parties” after it began to suspect that Defendant’s search for responsive materials was insufficient.  The court found that Defendant “did not put into place a systematic, reliable plan to find and produce all relevant documents in this case” and indicated that the record did not “allow the court to conclude that a thorough and reliable search was conducted.”  Accordingly, the court ordered the parties to work together to identify a list of custodians, search protocols and search terms to be utilized by the defendant and required the defendant to maintain a careful record of its search efforts and to produce any responsive documents.

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Procaps S.A. v. Patheon Inc., No. 12-24356-CIV-GOODMAN, 2015 WL 4430955 (S.D. Fla. July 20, 2015)

In this case, the court addressed Plaintiff’s designation of 95% of its forensically produced documents as “highly confidential” and, upon Defendant’s motion to compel Plaintiff to re-review and re-designate those documents, ordered that Defendant would be allowed to use all documents, regardless of their initial designation, unless the document was re-designated by the plaintiff in good faith within the short timeframe allowed by the court.  The court also ordered Plaintiff’s counsel to pay $25,000 in attorney’s fees.

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Wandering Dago, Inc. v. N.Y. State Office of Gen. Servs., No. 1:13-CV-1053 (MAD/RFT), 2015 WL 3453321 (N.D.N.Y. May 29, 2015)

In this case, the court addressed “whether officials in one governmental agency and their Attorney can be sanctioned for the destruction of email(s), belonging to yet another governmental agency, via the New York State’s Email Retention Policy. Essentially, would such an occurrence constitute spoliation of evidence, and, if so, are sanctions warranted?” The court found the answer was “no.”

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Burd v. Ford Motor Co., No. 3:13-cv-20976, 2015 WL 4137915 (S.D. W. Va. July 8, 2015)

In this case, Defendant sought to quash Plaintiffs’ notice of deposition and entry of a protective order precluding Plaintiffs from deposing Defendant’s representative regarding Defendant’s document retention policies and practices and specific methodologies for identifying relevant information in the present case, including Defendant’s admitted reliance on custodian “self-selection.” Citing Plaintiffs’ concerns regarding the sufficiency of Defendant’s discovery efforts and Defendant’s refusal to cooperate and/or to disclose the search terms utilized by its custodians in their search efforts, the court denied Defendant’s requests for protection and ordered the defendant to produce a Rule 30(b)(6) witness to testify regarding “its document retention and destruction polices, and to supply details regarding the document search performed by [Defendant] to date.”

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Cargill Meat Solutions Corp. v. Premium Beef Feeders, LLC, No. 13-cv-1168-EFM-TJJ, 2015 WL 3937410 (D. Kan. June 26, 2015)

In this case the court addressed Defendants’ motion to compel and Plaintiff’s objection to discovery based on proportionality. Concluding that Plaintiff failed to adequately establish the alleged burden of the requested discovery, the court granted the motion to compel.

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