Catagory:Case Summaries

Key Insight: Where defendant claimed infringement based on alleged testing of defendant?s devices but claimed that no testing documentation was created and where, upon a neutral third party?s examination of the relevant devices, it was revealed that two key logs were missing expected messages and reflected abnormal device behaviors that plaintiff was unable to explain, the court held that defendant was prejudiced by plaintiff?s failure to protect and preserve the logs and the resulting inability to verify purported testing and thus ordered that all evidence of plaintiff?s testing of the devices would be precluded from introduction to the record or other use and ordered plaintiff to pay defendant?s expenses associated with the sanctions motion

Nature of Case: Patent infringement

Electronic Data Involved: Log messages, evidence of testing

Key Insight: Where employee ?at the heart of Plaintiff?s claims of discrimination and harassment? ?misunderstood the requirements of the litigation hold? and continued his practice of deleting all emails every day but claimed that he never received or erased any emails related to plaintiff?s lawsuit and that all of his sent emails were preserved (as were the emails sent to him from his managers because of their compliance with the litigation hold), court found the deletions were negligent and ordered an instruction that the emails were destroyed and would have been favorable to plaintiff?s case

Nature of Case: Employment litigation

Electronic Data Involved: Email

Key Insight: Court granted motion for sanctions and ordered an adverse inference for trial where defendant was grossly negligent in its destruction of relevant emails (as proven by Plaintiff?s receipt of relevant emails from third parties that should have been in defendant?s possession, for example, and defendant?s failure to dispute the existence of certain emails which were relevant to plaintiff?s claims but which were not produced); court found defendant was ?at least negligent? in its failure to preserve (and later found that defendant was grossly negligent) where the city had no formal email retention policy and instead relied on its employees to determine what to save: ?Because the City has effectively conceded that it had a duty to preserve the e-mails in question, its failure to maintain a formal e-mail retention policy was at least negligent.?

Nature of Case: Violation of constitutionally protected property rights based on Stop Work Order

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Where a major question in the case was what defendant?s hard drive contained at the time it was returned to him and where defendant sent that hard drive to the manufacturer and received a replacement during a time when he was ?on notice? that the information may be relevant to future litigation, the court found that defendant was at least negligent in his handling of the drive and imposed an adverse inference which allowed the assumption that the drive contained the at-issue intellectual property at the time it was returned by the plaintiff to the police

Nature of Case: Action to collect reward offered for return of laptop and its contents

Electronic Data Involved: Hard drive