Key Insight: District court did not abuse discretion in dismissal of Plaintiff?s breach of contract action where Plaintiff failed to preserve (i.e., spoliated) relevant materials and where the record also suggested that certain evidence had been falsified
Nature of Case: Breach of contract, promissory estoppel, unjust enrichment
Electronic Data Involved: ESI
Key Insight: Motion for spoliation sanctions denied without prejudice where plaintiff argued that individual defendants violated their duty to preserve by continuing to use their personal electronic devices after receiving notice of the action and not “quarantining” the devices pending forensic imaging, as plaintiff did not make a specific showing that spoliation had, in fact, occurred; testimony of plaintiff’s forensic experts was mere speculation as neither expert identified any actual loss of data nor provided any forensic analysis of the personal electronic devices at issue
Nature of Case: Misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract, unfair competition
Electronic Data Involved: ESI stored on individual defendants’ personal electronic devices
Key Insight: Court denied plaintiff’s motion for protective order barring defendants from obtaining CEO’s e-mails during discovery, finding that CEO had potentially relevant information that defendants might not be able to obtain from other custodians and that CEO’s high level role did not make discovery of his e-mails any more or less burdensome than producing e-mails of other executives
Nature of Case: Patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: E-mail of CEO who joined plaintiff after lawsuit was filed
Key Insight: After ten days of hearings on Plaintiff?s Emergency Motion for Judgment on All Claims Based upon Defendants? Fraud Upon the Court, court found that defendants violated preservation order and deliberately ignored preliminary injunction requiring defendants to turn over all written or digital materials taken from or generated by plaintiff, or derived in whole or in part from documents generated by plaintiff, that contain customer lists, pricing information or similar information, and not to retain copies of such materials, and that defendants spoliated evidence and committed a fraud upon the court; appropriate sanction was the entry of default against defendants, dismissal of the defendants? counterclaims, and an order requiring defendants to compensate plaintiff for attorneys? fees and costs incurred in litigating the motion; parties to submit memoranda describing their views regarding the extent of the default established and the future course of the litigation
Nature of Case: Distributer sued former employees who formed competing company
Electronic Data Involved: Computers, laptops, hard drives and other electronic storage devices
Key Insight: Considering motion to compel production of evidence of incidents similar to the attack on plaintiff, which was the underlying subject of the litigation, the court granted plaintiff?s motion to compel, in part, and reasoned as to defendant?s assertions that the database containing the requested information could not be easily searched (i.e., that the request was overly burdensome)that ?the fact that a corporation has an unwieldy record keeping system which requires it to incur the heavy expenditures of time and effort to produce requested documents is an insufficient reason to prevent disclosure of otherwise discoverable information.?
Nature of Case: Complaint for damages against casino in which plaintiff was attached: premises liability
Electronic Data Involved: ESI from database
Key Insight: Finding that defendant had failed to obey previous discovery orders by not timely searching for and producing ESI in response to plaintiff’s requests for production and that defendant?s representations regarding compliance were not completely correct, court once again ordered defendant to produce complete responses, without objections or redactions, ordered defendant to pay plaintiff?s expenses incurred in filing second motion, and ordered parties to endeavor to agree on search terms to be used to obtain responsive ESI; in the event parties could not agree to search terms, custodians and date ranges, then defendant must use those proposed by plaintiff
Nature of Case: Insurance dispute
Electronic Data Involved: ESI
Key Insight: Court denied plaintiff’s motion for spoliation sanctions as plaintiff offered only “some slight evidence” that city acted with a culpable state of mind, most of the evidence did not support a conclusion that the city intentionally destroyed evidence, and any prejudice that plaintiff would suffer from not having the two dispatch calls was minimal
Nature of Case: Discrimination
Electronic Data Involved: Recordings of dispatch calls, police reports, officer meeting minutes
Key Insight: Court denied defendant?s motion to compel production of all emails and spreadsheets in native format, since the parties? Joint Rule 26(f) Report was a stipulation and therefore Rule 34(b) did not govern their dispute; the parties? Joint Rule 26(f) Report did not require that all ESI be produced electronically but only stated that ESI may be produced in paper, PDF, or TIFF and that electronic files should be produced in native format when it was more practicable to do so; defendant failed to articulate why metadata was important to emails; and plaintiff had already produced some of its spreadsheets in native format (Excel) where the printouts were difficult to read
Nature of Case: Trademark infringement
Electronic Data Involved: Email and spreadsheets
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
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
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