Catagory:Case Summaries

Brookshire Bros., Ltd. v. Aldridge, –S.W.3d–, 2014 WL 2994435 (Tex. July 3, 2013)

In this case, the Supreme Court of Texas “enunciate[d] with greater clarity the standards governing whether an act of spoliation has occurred and the parameters of a trial court’s discretion to impose a remedy upon a finding of spoliation, including submission of a spoliation instruction to the jury” and held that such an instruction is only appropriate when the destruction of evidence was intentional or deprived the opposing party of “any meaningful ability to present a claim or defense.”  The court also concluded that “[s]poliation findings—and their related sanctions—are to be determined by the trial judge, outside the presence of the jury, in order to avoid unfairly prejudicing the jury by the presentation of evidence that is unrelated to the facts underlying the lawsuit” and that “[a]ccordingly, evidence bearing directly upon whether a party has spoliated evidence is not to be presented to the jury except insofar as it relates to the substance of the lawsuit.”  Applying the newly-articulated standards to the facts of the case before it, the court held that “imposition of the severe sanction of a spoliation instruction was an abuse of discretion” and that the trial court erred “in admitting evidence of the circumstances of the spoliating conduct.”  Accordingly, the judgment of the court of appeals was reversed, and the case was remanded for a new trial. Read More

Kyko Global Inc. v. Prithvi Info. Solutions Ltd., No. C13-1034 MJP, 2014 WL 2694236 (W.D. Wash. June 13, 2014)

In this case, the court addressed the question of whether privilege was waived by the sale of a seized computer at public auction.  Balancing the relevant factors under Washington law, the court determined that the prior owner’s steps to protect her information by reformatting the computer and installing a new operating system coupled with defendants’ prompt efforts to remedy the error and considerations of fairness weighed against waiver. Read More

First Tech. Capital, Inc. v. JPMorgan Chase N.A., No. 5:12-CV-289-KSF-REW, 2013 WL 7800409 (E.D. Ky. Dec. 10, 2013)

In this case, the court found that privilege was waived where First Technology Capital, Inc. (“FTC”*), through counsel, failed to take reasonable steps to prevent the inadvertent disclosure of privileged materials.  The court’s determination that counsel’s efforts were unreasonable was based, in part, on the speed of the alleged page-by-page review (each document received, on average, only 9.84 seconds of review) and FTC’s failure to produce a privilege log, among other things. Read More

Progressive Cas. Ins. Co. v. Delaney, No. 2:11-cv-00678-LRH-PAL, 2014 WL 2112927 (D. Nev. May 20, 2014)

In this case, the parties agreed upon an e-discovery protocol which was memorialized in a court order.  Shortly into its review, Plaintiff determined that the agreed-upon methodology (manual review of search term hits) would be too time consuming and expensive and decided that it would instead apply predictive coding to those documents identified by the agreed-upon search terms—which it began doing without consulting the requesting party or the court.  The requesting party, FDIC-R (FDIC as Receiver), opposed Plaintiff’s unilateral action for several reasons, including the lack of transparency around the predictive coding methodology employed and that the predictive coding protocol did not comport with the recommended “best practices” for the chosen software program.  Ultimately, despite expressing support for the use of predictive coding in discovery, the court ordered Plaintiff to produce all of the documents identified by the agreed-upon keywords, subject to a clawback order, where such a production had been memorialized as an acceptable option in the stipulated order and where Plaintiff had abandoned the option it originally selected (manual review).  The court also noted the FDIC-R’s commitment to devoting the necessary resources to review the documents quickly and thus allow discovery—which had been “stalled for many months”—to move forward. Read More

In re Domestic Drywall Antitrust Litig., —F. Supp. 2d—, 2014 WL 1909260 (E.D. Pa. May 12, 2014)

The issue presented is whether Plaintiffs must provide facts supporting Plaintiffs’ allegations—a frequent issue in antitrust litigation. The Court concludes, because of Plaintiffs’ counsel’s felicitous access to electronically stored information, that Plaintiffs must provide a pretrial statement setting forth the facts they now have, and Defendants must subsequently reciprocate.

Ignoring the capabilities which ESI allows the parties to search for and produce factual information in a case of this nature is like pretending businesses still communicate by smoke signals. Read More

Procaps S.A. v. Patheon Inc., No. 12-24356-CIV, 2014 WL 800468 (S.D. Fla. Feb. 28, 2014); No. 12-24356-CIV, 2014 WL 1047748 (S.D. Fla. Mar. 18, 2014)

In this pair of opinions, the court addressed the obligations of client and counsel with regard to the preservation and collection of electronically stored information and the obligation of counsel to obtain input from relevant custodians when crafting search terms.  In the first opinion, in light of deficient efforts to preserve and collect potentially relevant information, the court ordered an extensive forensic examination of Plaintiff’s data repositories by a neutral third party and crafted a protocol for the production of information identified by the search terms applied.  In the second opinion, the court confirmed the “basic rule” that “outside counsel ‘must carefully craft the appropriate keywords, with input from the ESI’s custodians as to the words and abbreviations they use’” and ordered Counsel to “obtain search word input from all the ESI custodians” and to pay a portion of the attorney’s fees awarded, with his firm to pay the rest.  The court was specifically critical of Plaintiff’s counsel’s communication (or lack thereof) with opposing counsel regarding how search terms were generated and whether Plaintiff’s custodians had been consulted, which caused Defendant to file its motion to compel. Read More

United States v. Shabudin, No. 11-cr-00664-JSW-1 (NJV), 2014 WL 1379717 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 8, 2014)

In this criminal case, the Government was ordered to continue to maintain a Relativity Database (the “Database”) utilized by the parties to review documents produced by the Government and to continue to provide Defendants with the access and support that the parties had previously negotiated, despite the depletion of funding for the Database which was accelerated by the Government’s voluntary actions. Read More

Miller v. York Risk Servs. Grp., No. 2:13-cv-1419 JWS, 2014 WL 1456349 (D. Ariz. Apr. 15, 2014)

In this case, Plaintiffs determined that they would “need to discover electronically stored information” and sought first to compel the defendant to “participate in a Rule 30(b)(6) deposition regarding the manner and methods used by  Defendant to store and maintain electronically stored information.”  Plaintiffs argued that taking the deposition first would “allow them to tailor their discovery requests to avoid potential disputes over what may be discovered” and contended that other courts had allowed such discovery for that reason.  The court denied Plaintiffs’ Motion to Compel. Read More

Anderson Living Trust v. WPX Energy Prod., LLC, —F.R.D.—, 2014 WL 930869 (D.N.M. Mar. 6, 2014)

In this case, the court analyzed the question of whether “a party must, under rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, arrange and label electronically stored information (‘ESI’) to correspond to the categories in the request, or whether compliance with rule 34(b)(2)(E)(ii)—production of ESI in the form that the requesting party requests, or in another reasonably usable form—is sufficient” and concluded that “the rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i) requirement that documents be produced either in the usual course of business or labeled to correspond to categories in the request does not apply to ESI.”  Thus, the court declined to order Defendants to arrange and label their production, including approximately 20,000 pages of hard copy documents which had already been scanned and produced in .PDF format at Plaintiff’s request. Read More

T&E Investment Group, LLC v. Faulkner, Nos. 11-CV-0724-P, 3:11-CV-1558-P, 2014 WL 550596 (N.D. Tex. Feb. 12, 2014)

In this case, the District Court adopted the recommendation of the Magistrate Judge and ordered an adverse inference and monetary sanctions for Defendant’s manipulation of metadata using a bulk file changer in an attempt to conceal his use of an unproduced computer. Read More