Case Summaries – Page 140 – Electronic Discovery Law

Koninklijke Philips N.V. v. Hunt Control Sys., No. 11-3684 DMC, 2014 WL 1494517 (D.N.J. Apr. 16, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Where Defendant sought to take a 30(b)(6) deposition to inquire regarding whether Plaintiff was ?using the appropriate search tools for ESI discovery,? based on Defendant?s expert?s determination that Plaintiff had ?some of most (sic) sophisticated and comprehensive state-of-the-art document search and location tools? and the assertion that ?Philips refuses to use these tools? and where Plaintiff indicated that it had always used ?a custodian-based approach to collecting ESI[ ],? and that it outsourced its collection to Microsoft Online Services and did not have a contract that permitted the type of searching and collecting suggested by the defendant, the court found that Plaintiff had adequately established the reasonableness of its approach and also reasoned that while the deposition itself would not be a burden, it would open the door to potentially burdensome additional discovery that was unlikely to be productive and thus was not warranted

Nature of Case: Appeal of decision of Trademark Trial and Appeal Board

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Freedman v. Weatherford Int?l, Ltd., No. 12 Civ. 2121(LAK)(JCF), 2014 WL 3767034 (S.D.N.Y. July 25, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Court considered plaintiffs? motion to compel production of ?certain reports comparing the results of the defendants document search and production in this case with? the search terms proposed by the plaintiff and with searches and productions related to prior investigations but denied the motion upon defendant?s showing that preparing only a sample report took ?several weeks, over 250 hours of vendor time, and 750 hours of computer processing time? and where plaintiffs offered ?no adequate factual basis for their belief that the current production [was] deficient? in support of what amounted to a request for ?discovery on discovery?; court acknowledged, however, that ?there are circumstances where such collateral discovery is warranted?

Nature of Case: False and misleading statements in violation of securities laws

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Lawrence v. Dependable Med. Transp. Servs., LLC, No. 2:13-cv-0417-HRH, 2014 WL 2510623 (D. Ariz. June 4, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Where plaintiffs supported their motion for partial summary judgment with plainly privileged e-mails between defendants and their attorneys, which defendants had inadvertently produced, court granted defendants’ motion to strike and ruled that, because plaintiffs had failed to comply with FRCP 26(b)(5)(B), they would not be allowed to use the e-mails for any purpose

Nature of Case: Fair Labor Standards Act claims

Electronic Data Involved: Privileged e-mails

Riley v. City of Prescott, No. CV-11-08123-PCT-JAT, 2014 WL 641632 (D. Ariz. Feb. 19, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Court applied five-part test to deny plaintiff’s motion for claim-dispositive sanctions but would allow reasonable attorneys’ fees and adverse inference instruction where city failed to suspend its 45-day retention policy for city employee email and defendant mayor apparently destroyed or failed to preserve relevant email in his private Gmail account, as numerous emails on which the mayor or his assistant were senders or recipients were discovered from third party sources, e.g., Google, Inc., but none were included in defendants’ production

Nature of Case: Wrongful termination

Electronic Data Involved: Email

FDIC v. Baldini, No. 1:12-7050, 2014 WL 1302479 (S.D. W. Va. Mar. 28, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Court denied plaintiff’s motion for protective order, rejecting plaintiff’s proposed protocol that would require defendants to supply search terms (which plaintiff would then apply to the ESI) and require defendants to pay ESI copying costs; court ordered plaintiff to fashion initial set of search terms and work with defendants to reach agreement on search terms to be used, and set out protocol to be followed by the parties for the production

Nature of Case: Breach of fiduciary duties, negligence

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

McNabb v. City of Overland Park, No. 12-CV-2331 CM/TJJ, 2014 WL 1493124 (D. Kan. Apr. 16, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Court denied motion to compel defendant to produce additional 10,189 responsive emails where plaintiff did not identify any specific discovery request for which she sought to compel production, or any specific objection thereto that she claimed to be invalid, and defendant had already produced five categories of emails totaling over 36,000 documents; court advised that plaintiff must present something more than mere speculation that search of 14 custodians’ email files using 35 proposed search terms was likely to reveal additional responsive emails, and further noted that, on its face, search term list was overly broad and likely to capture many emails having nothing to do with issues in case

Nature of Case: Sexual discrimination, harassment, hostile work environment and retaliation claims

Electronic Data Involved: Email

Dataflow, Inc. v. Peerless Ins. Co., No. 3:11-cv-1127 (LEK/DEP), 2014 WL 148685 (N.D.N.Y. Jan. 13, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: District court adopted magistrate judge?s recommendation (at 2013 WL 6992130) that plaintiff?s motion for adverse inference instruction be granted as sanction for defendant?s grossly negligent failure to preserve internal emails in violation of its own retention policy; court deferred ruling on the language of the jury instruction until the filing of pretrial memoranda so as to consider proposed jury instructions as a whole

Nature of Case: Insurance coverage dispute

Electronic Data Involved: Internal emails

Vasquez v. Cal. Sch. of Culinary Arts, 230 Cal.App.4th 35(2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Trial court did not err in awarding plaintiffs their attorneys’ fees and costs incurred after successfully opposing Sallie Mae’s motion to quash subpoena, as Sallie Mae lacked substantial justification for its motion given that plaintiffs did not seek to have Sallie Mae extract and compile information from paper files but only asked that Sallie Mae extract ESI from an existing database, plaintiffs never expressed an unwillingness to pay for the reasonable cost of doing so but repeatedly asked for a cost estimate, and Sallie Mae ignored plaintiffs’ requests and did not provide a cost estimate until after its motion to quash had been denied and plaintiffs’ request for attorneys’ fees was being heard

Nature of Case: 1,034 former students asserted claims of fraud, breach of contract and violations of consumer laws

Electronic Data Involved: Loan records maintained by Sallie Mae

Freedman v. Weatherford Int?l Ltd., No. 12 Civ. 2121(LAK)(JCF), 2014 WL 4547039 (S.D.N.Y. Sep. 12, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Where plaintiffs offered 18 emails from “critical custodians” that were produced not by defendant but by a third party as new evidence to support motion for reconsideration of order denying motion to compel, court noted differences in search terms used in respective searches and opined that requests for discovery regarding a party?s discovery efforts should be ?closely scrutinized in light of the danger of extending the already costly and time consuming discovery process ad infinitum?; rejecting plaintiffs’ motion for reconsideration, court observed: ??[T]he Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not require perfection.? . . . Weatherford has reviewed ?millions of documents and [produced] hundreds of thousands,? comprising ?nearly 4.4 million pages? in this case. It is unsurprising that some relevant documents may have fallen through the cracks.?

Nature of Case: Putative class action alleging securities fraud

Electronic Data Involved: Email

Apple Inc. v. Samsung Elecs. Co., No. 11-CV-01846-LHK, 2014 WL 4745933 (N.D. Cal. Sep. 19, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Trial court considered parties? respective objections to clerk?s taxation of costs and further reduced Apple?s costs award; among other things, trial court rejected Apple?s argument that it was entitled to recover e-discovery costs incurred in processing all documents collected for review, whether or not they were all produced, and instead reduced award to approximate amount Apple spent on documents that were actually produced to Samsung; as Apple estimated it uploaded a total of 18,264,712 pages in the litigation, of which 2,944,467 pages were ultimately produced, court calculated that approximately 16.12% of Apple?s e-discovery costs were spent on documents produced to Samsung and awarded Apple $238,103 for e-discovery costs

Nature of Case: Patent infringement

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Catagory:Case Summaries