Catagory:Case Summaries

Ridge Chrysler Jeep, LLC v. Daimler Chrysler Servs. N. Am., LLC, 2006 WL 2808158 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 6, 2006)

In this opinion (which was issued September 6, 2006, not 2005), the court adopted the Report and Recommendation of the magistrate judge assigned to handle discovery disputes in the case, and dismissed the case with prejudice. One basis for dismissal related to plaintiffs’ failure to preserve and produce financial records stored on computers and misrepresentations about same.

Plaintiffs were two dealerships (“Midlothian” and “Marquette”) that filed a verified complaint alleging that Chrysler persisted in a “shocking corporate policy of blatant racial discrimination and redlining” by refusing to provide financing for African-American customers purchasing cars at the dealerships. Plaintiffs alleged violation of the Automobile Dealers’ Day in Court Act, as well as state law violations of the Illinois Motor Vehicle Franchise Act, tortious interference with prospective business advantage, and breach of contract. Mr. Gerald Gorman was the president and owner of both dealerships, and he personally verified the facts included in plaintiffs’ verified complaint.

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O’Brien v. Ed Donnelly Enters., Inc., 2006 WL 2583327 (S.D. Ohio Sept. 5, 2006)

In this suit brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act, defendants had produced over 8,000 documents consisting largely of plaintiffs’ work schedules and time punch and payroll records, including Time Punch Change Approval Reports (“TPCA Reports”) related to plaintiffs. The TPCA Reports were printed from defendants’ computer system, referred to as the “in-store processor” or “ISP.” The reports were printed automatically by the ISP as part of the closing paperwork each day, and were regularly kept and maintained by defendants as paper files. The information contained in the TPCA Reports was stored in the ISP in electronic form for 72 days. In addition, defendants backed-up the ISP nightly, using one of three rotating backup tapes. Each backup tape contained information for the preceding 72 days. The tapes were overwritten every three days so that, at most, the backup tapes combined contain information for the preceding 74 days. Defendants attested that the tapes were intended solely for disaster recovery.

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Consol. Aluminum Corp. v. Alcoa, Inc., 2006 WL 2583308 (M.D. La. July 19, 2006)

In this opinion, the magistrate judge considered plaintiff’s motion for sanctions based on spoliation of evidence, and concluded that, although adverse inference instructions were not warranted, defendant’s conduct in negligently failing to preserve electronic evidence “should not go unpunished.” Accordingly, the magistrate ordered that defendant bear plaintiff’s costs for re-deposing certain witnesses for the limited purpose of inquiring into issues raised by the destruction of evidence and regarding any newly discovered emails. The magistrate further granted plaintiff’s request to serve additional discovery relating to the electronic evidence which was not preserved, and awarded plaintiff the reasonable costs and attorneys’ fees incurred in bringing this motion and in investigating and attempting to obtain the discovery at issue.

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OKI Am., Inc. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., 2006 WL 2547464 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 31, 2006)

In this patent litigation, AMD moved to compel the production of certain financial documents, complaining that OKI had produced a disk containing 29,000 pages of financial materials which “were not in electronic format and not searchable.” In response, OKI expressed “outrage” that AMD was demanding exactly the kind of documents that AMD itself refused to provide. OKI stated it was forced to spend almost $25,000 to convert AMD’s documents into a searchable electronic format, after AMD produced its documents in unsearchable "tiff" format. Further, AMD had produced its materials “in a form that did not correspond to OKI’s infringement contentions and not in Microsoft Excel, as OKI had requested.”

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Lewis v. Sch. Dist. #70, 2006 WL 2506465 (S.D. Ill. Aug. 25, 2006)

In this wrongful termination lawsuit, plaintiff sought production of “All emails with attachments sent or received by anyone at the school since 1-1-97.” Defendants objected that the request was vague, ambiguous, overly broad, unduly burdensome, oppressive, and would encompass matters not relevant to the litigation. Notwithstanding their objections, defendants subsequently produced all existing emails sent to or from the plaintiff, or pertaining to plaintiff’s performance during the time period at issue.

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Frey v. Gainey Transp. Servs., Inc., 2006 WL 2443787 (N.D. Ga. Aug. 22, 2006)

This personal injury litigation arose from an accident involving plaintiff’s car and a tractor-trailer driven by defendant Rogers while he was employed by defendant Gainey Transportation. Ten days after the accident occurred and before any litigation had been filed, plaintiff’s counsel sent a letter to Tim Kelly, the Safety Director at Gainey, demanding that Mr. Kelly preserve numerous and varied documents and materials fully described in a fifteen-page attachment to the letter. Plaintiff’s counsel asserted that any “destruction or alteration” of the material would be considered “spoliation of evidence.” In this decision, the court denies plaintiff’s motion for sanctions based upon Gainey’s failure to preserve any “QualComm” satellite tracking information.

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In re CV Therapeutics, Inc. Sec. Litig., 2006 WL 2458720 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 22, 2006)

In this securities class action, the parties had previously agreed on the entry of a stipulated order governing the discovery of material restored from backup tapes maintained by the defendant. (A copy of the Backup Tape Stipulation is available here.) Subsequently, plaintiffs learned from an undisclosed source that additional backup tapes existed which had not been produced, and moved to compel. The court issued an order dated April 3, 2006, which resolved that dispute, along with several other discovery disputes. (A copy of the court’s April 3, 2006 order is available here.) With respect to the newly discovered backup tapes, the court concluded that defendants had not intentionally hid the existence of the tapes, but that they should have been subject to the terms of the parties’ Backup Tape Stipulation. It continued:

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Nat’l Econ. Research Assocs., Inc. v. Evans, 2006 WL 2440008 (Mass. Super. Ct. Aug. 3, 2006)

In this litigation between a consulting firm and its former employee, the court considered the firm’s motion to compel the production of attorney-client privileged communications. Plaintiff sought production of emails sent and received via the employee’s personal, password-protected email account, which were saved in a temporary Internet file on the employee’s company-issued laptop and retrieved through forensic means after his departure from the firm.

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Thyroff v. Nationwide Mut. Ins. Co., 460 F.3d 400 (2d Cir. 2006)

The plaintiff in this case is an insurance agent formerly associated with the defendant insurance company. Plaintiff and defendant had executed an Agent’s Agreement, and defendant had required that plaintiff lease an agency office-automation system (“AOA”), including hardware and software, from defendant. During the 21 years he was an agent of defendant, plaintiff’s office operations were very much dependent on the AOA. Plaintiff and his staff entered business data and information onto the hard drives of the AOA system on a daily basis, and defendant then uploaded that information on a nightly basis from plaintiff’s computers onto defendant’s computers. In the process, defendant also uploaded plaintiff’s personal information.

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Delta Fin. Corp. v. Morrison, 2006 WL 2403437 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Aug. 17, 2006)
This case involved breach of contract and fraud claims stemming from an exchange of assets between some of the parties, which took place in August 2001. The opinion resolves the parties’ dispute relating to three categories of electronic documents sought by one of the defendants (“LLC”) from the plaintiff (“DFC”): 1) non-email electronic documents which LLC claimed were not captured by DFC’s search process; 2) emails which LLC claimed were not captured by DFC’s ninety-day back-up tapes; and 3) emails from January 1, 1999 through July 12, 2000.

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