Case Summaries – Page 7 – Electronic Discovery Law

Mahboob v. Educational Credit Management Corp. (S.D. Cal. 2021)

Mar 01 2021

Key Insight: Plaintiff brought a (potential) class action lawsuit against Defendant for invasion of privacy based on Defendant recording phone calls without the consent of the other party. After bringing the suit, Plaintiff discovered that the call data and recordings had been deleted. Plaintiff filed a Motion for Sanctions against Defendant were both forms of ESI based on intentional spoliation of evidence.

Defendant had placed a legal hold on requested data but also failed to suspend its data retention policies. Plaintiff’s Motion for Sanctions regarding deleted call data was purportedly delayed by Plaintiff because the litigation was stayed for approximately two years while an appeal was pending. The Court found that Plaintiff’s Motion for Sanctions regarding the deleted call data was untimely, and therefore, denied it on such grounds.

The Court partially granted and denied Plaintiff’s Motion for Sanctions regarding the deleted call recordings, finding that Defendant should not have deleted the call recordings, but did not do so intentionally. Plaintiff was awarded attorney’s fees for having brought the Motion, but the Court declined to impose a sanction of a jury instruction regarding spoliation because the call recordings per se were not relevant to proving Plaintiff’s case.

Nature of Case: Invasion of Privacy

Electronic Data Involved: Phone Calls, Phone Call Data

Case Summary

Cary v. Ne. Ill. Reg’l Commuter R.R. Corp. (N.D. Ill. Feb. 22, 2021)

Feb 22 2021

Key Insight: Court granted, in large part, plaintiff’s motion to compel ESI, requiring defendant to disclose data sources that may contain relevant ESI and refused to impose an “arbitrary limit of five or seven custodians” requested by defendants given the number of people identified as having potentially relevant information in their initial disclosures. The court urged the parties to agree upon search terms to less the burden of ESI searches and revisit an agreed time period in light of the court’s memorandum and order, rather than take “absolute line-in-the-sand positions” (citing Standing Order Relating to the Discovery of Electronically Stored Information at Principle 1.02 (Cooperation)). The court denied plaintiff’s request to produce the entire contents of her work email, finding the blanket request overbroad on its face.

Nature of Case: Employment discrimination

Electronic Data Involved: Email

Case Summary

Benebone LLC v. Pet Qwerks, Inc. (C.D. Cal. Feb. 18, 2021)

Feb 18 2021

Key Insight: Court granted defendants’ motion to compel plaintiff to produce Slack messages used as part of its internal business communications. Despite the potentially 30,000 Slack messages to review, the court found compelling the testimony from defendants’ forensic expert who stated there are a number of tools and software vendors that have streamlined review and production of Slack messages. Further, searches could be limited to certain Slack channels, users and custodians to very streamline the volume of messages for review. Thus, “requiring review and production of Slack messages by Benebone is generally comparable to requiring search and production of emails and is not unduly burdensome or disproportional to the needs of this case – if the requests and searches are appropriately limited and focused.”

Nature of Case: Intellectual property

Electronic Data Involved: Slack messages

Case Summary

Optrics Inc. v. Barracuda Networks, Inc. (N.D. Cal. Feb. 4, 2021)

Feb 04 2021

Key Insight: The Plaintiff in litigation over claims of trademark infringement, unfair competition and breach of contract failed to preserve and destroyed discoverable electronic data, and similarly, failed to prepare for 30(b)(6) depositions. Moreover, there were repeated delays (and time extensions) in Plaintiff responding to Defendant’s discovery requests. In doing so, the Plaintiff repeatedly disobeyed discovery orders issued by the Court.

The litigation settled while discovery was pending. The Defendant moved for sanctions against the Plaintiff for its conduct in discovery, and the Court, pursuant to FRCP 37(b), awarded sanctions against Plaintiff and its counsel, jointly and severally. Plaintiff’s former counsel subsequently claimed that it should not be held liable for the sanctions because it was unable to control the conduct of its client in responding to discovery order(s) and requests.

Nature of Case: Intellectual Property, Trademark Infringement, Contracts, Unfair Competition

Electronic Data Involved: Email, Electronic Files, Hard Drives.

Case Summary

Liadis v. Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (Mich. Ct. App. January 28, 2021)

Jan 28 2021

Key Insight: The trial court ordered plaintiff to produce her laptops to defendant’s computer forensic expert. In the days prior to turning over the laptops, about 41,000 unidentified files were deleted by a computer program called “CCleaner.” Defendant moved to dismiss plaintiff’s complaint based on spoliation and discovery violations and the trial court denied defendant’s motion. The Court of Appeals agreed with the trial court and found that plaintiff did not intentionally destroy evidence and it was unlikely that any evidence was in fact lost. Both sides’ forensic experts found the CCleaner was installed before the complaint was filed and was set to run automatically. The court was open to a lesser sanction than dismissal such as an adverse jury instruction should defendant request one.

Nature of Case: Personal Injury

Electronic Data Involved: Laptop files

Case Summary

Holloway v. County of Orange (C.D. Cal. 2021)

Jan 20 2021

Key Insight: The court granted defendants’ motion for sanctions based on spoliation of evidence based on plaintiff’s deletion of his Facebook account. “Plaintiff had an obligation to preserve his Facebook account, he deleted the account with a culpable state of mind, and the account was relevant to Defendants’ claims.” The court further ordered that an adverse inference jury instruction was appropriate.

Nature of Case: Civil Rights

Electronic Data Involved: Social Media, Facebook

Case Summary

Cretacci v. Hare

Jan 20 2021

Key Insight: A party must explicitly request all possible remedies it seeks. Courts will not impose unrequested sanctions even if it determines lesser sanctions were warranted. Plaintiff only requested a default judgment sanction which requires that Defendants intentionally lost or destroyed data so it could not be used in litigation. Because there was no finding of intent, a default judgment sanction could not be issued. A lesser sanction of “measures no greater than necessary to cure the prejudice” could have been imposed because Plaintiff was prejudiced by the loss of ESI and there is no intent requirement. However, no sanctions were issued because such sanctions were not requested.

Nature of Case: Civil Rights

Electronic Data Involved: Video

Case Summary

DR Distributors v. 21 Century Smoking, Inc. (N.D. Ill. 2021)

Key Insight: The court granted plaintiff’s motion for sanctions but declined to find “intent to deprive” under Rule 37(e), instead applying Rule 26(g) for failing “to make a reasonable investigation to ensure that [defendant] provided all available responsive information and documents.” The court issued sanctions and curative measures under Rules 37(a), 37(b), 37(c) and 37(e)(1). This 256-page sanctions opinion arises from ESI issues beginning at the outset of protracted litigation involving infringement claims over similar trademarks for e-cigarettes. Defendants and their counsel were sanctioned for multiple failures to preserve and collect ESI, including: failure to preserve messages from web-based email and chat applications; failure to turn off auto-delete functions on messages; defense counsel’s failure to follow-up with written hold instructions to preserve relevant ESI and take steps to collect messages from web-based applications; defense counsel’s failure to perform custodial interviews to identify likely sources of ESI; defense counsel’s failure to understand that relevant emails may be found in both corporate and personal email and mistakenly believed that data within the web applications would be saved to corporate hard drives; failure to disclose the existence of relevant ESI; defense counsel offered false testimony about the existence of ESI; and defense counsel’s failure to supervise defendants in self-collected ESI.

Nature of Case: Trademark infringement (Lanham Act)

Electronic Data Involved: Email, Instant messages

Case Summary

Bruno v. Peak Resorts, Inc. (N.Y.A.D. Jan. 14, 2021)

Jan 14 2021

Key Insight: The trial court granted an adverse inference instruction and the appellate court affirmed, finding that plaintiff engaged in spoliation of evidence when he (1) posted a comment to a blog entry about trail conditions on the mountain on the date of his injuries and then later deleted the comment, and (2) belatedly produced Facebook posts relating to his injuries. Plaintiff failed to provide “accurate representations” regarding his posts. His deleted blog comment related to whether the ski trail where he sustained injuries was open or closed on the day of his accident and its subject matter went directly to defendants’ defenses.

Nature of Case: Negligence; Personal Injury

Electronic Data Involved: Blog Post

Case Summary

In re Valsartan N-Nitrosodimethylamine, Losartan, & Irbesartan Prod. Liab. Litig. (D.N.J. 2021)

Jan 08 2021

Key Insight: Defendant claimed that information sought by Plaintiff was discoverable. Plaintiff objected on the basis of confidentiality, and the Court struck Defendant’s confidentiality designations. Specifically, the Court rejected Defendant’s claims that the emails sought contained trade secret and proprietary information, and had the potential to cause it competitive harm. The Court ordered Defendant to use the it’s ruling as an example for dealing with similarly designated documents.

Nature of Case: Diversity, Product Liability

Electronic Data Involved: Email

Case Summary

Catagory:Case Summaries