Catagory:Case Summaries

City of Ontario v. Quon, 130 S. Ct. 2619 (2010)

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in City of Ontario v. Quon, a case addressing whether a government employer’s search through an employee’s text messages, sent and received on a work-issued pager, violated the Fourth Amendment.  Reversing the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court held that the search was reasonable and that the employee’s Fourth Amendment rights were not violated.

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Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc., 717 F. Supp. 2d 965 (C.D. Cal. 2010)

Defendant subpoenaed several social networking sites seeking disclosure of plaintiff’s subscriber information and communications relevant to the underlying dispute.  Plaintiff sought to quash the subpoenas arguing that such disclosure would violate the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”).  The magistrate judge denied plaintiff’s motion to quash upon finding the SCA was inapplicable. Plaintiff moved for reconsideration of the order.

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Jones v. Bremen High School Dist. 228, 2010 WL 2106640 (N.D. Ill. May 25, 2010)

Despite receipt of plaintiff’s EEOC claim alleging employment discrimination, defendant failed to institute a litigation hold.  Instead, defendant identified three individuals likely to possess responsive information and asked them to identify and preserve relevant evidence.  Some of the individuals identified were substantially involved in the alleged discriminatory treatment of the plaintiff.  Despite this failure, defendant eventually produced most of the requested information, although some email was deemed likely to have been lost forever.  Finding defendant’s preservation efforts “reckless and grossly negligent”, the court ordered sanctions.

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Helmert v. Butterball, LLC, 2010 WL 2179180 (E.D. Ark. May 27, 2010)

In this collective action brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act, plaintiffs and defendant reached significant impasse regarding the appropriate scope of discovery, including disagreement regarding search terms, the number and identity of custodians, the sources of data to be searched, and who should bear the costs.  Resolving each issue in turn, the court’s discussion focused in large part upon weighing the burden of plaintiffs’ requests against the potential to discover relevant information, including a discussion of the discoverability of backup tapes.  The court also declined to shift the costs of production.

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Maggette v. BL Dev. Corp., 2010 WL 2010816 (N.D. Miss. May 17, 2010)

For defendant’s and counsels’ discovery violations discovered with the assistance of a special master, including failing to adequately search for responsive material and misrepresenting search efforts to the court, the court indicated a likelihood that it would find as a matter of law that an agency relationship existed between defendant and another entity implicated in the underlying accident claims.  Accordingly, a hearing was set to address the possible sanctions as well as the implications of counsels’ actions for their involvement with the case.

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Mt. Hawley Ins. Co. v. Felman Prod., Inc., 2010 WL 1990555 (S.D. W. Va. May 18, 2010)

Where plaintiff (Felman Production, Inc.) failed to take sufficiently reasonable precautions to prevent the disclosure of a privileged email, privilege was waived.

In this case, the court addressed a number of issues, including the parties’ compliance with their clawback agreement and the applicability of the crime-fraud exception to 377 inadvertently produced, privileged emails.  The primary focus of this summary, however, is the court’s analysis of whether the privilege was waived as to one specific email, “the May 14th email”, and in particular, its analysis of the reasonableness of plaintiff’s precautions to prevent such disclosure.

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Passlogix, Inc. v. 2FA Tech., LLC, 708 F. Supp. 2d 378 (S.D.N.Y. 2010)

Upon finding that defendants spoliated relevant information, including emails, Skype messages, and computer logs, the court declined to order an adverse inference, to preclude defendants from the presentation of arguments implicating the discarded documents, or to order defendants to pay plaintiff’s costs, but ordered monetary sanctions in the amount of $10,000, after balancing “2FA’s litigation conduct with its status as a small corporation.”

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Wilson v. Thorn Energy, LLC, 2010 WL 1712236 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 15, 2010)

In this case, the court ordered sanctions for defendants’ failure to preserve relevant data where defendants failed to back up a flash drive containing all relevant financial records and where that data was lost as the result of the flash drive’s failure.

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In re Art Harris, 2010 WL 1612205 (Tex. App. Apr. 22, 2010)

In this case, the appellate court granted petitioner’s writ of mandamus and ordered the withdrawal of three underlying discovery orders upon finding that the trial court abused its discretion when it ordered the production of petitioner’s hard drives for forensic examination and when it appointed a special master to conduct that examination.

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Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., 529 F.3d 892 (9th Cir. 2008);  City of Ontario v. Quon (08-1332)

In the summer of 2008, the Ninth Circuit held that a city employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy as to personal text-messages sent from his city-issued and city-owned text-messaging pager (‘pager”).  The court further ruled that the employee’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when his supervisor read those text messages, after requesting transcripts from the service provider.  The city has appealed the court’s findings to the United States Supreme Court and oral arguments were heard on Monday, April 19th. An opinion is expected in June, 2010. 

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