Key Insight: Adopting Zubulake and McPeek approaches, court ordered defendant to restore a sampling of five backup tapes selected by the plaintiff; parties would thereafter be required to make additional submissions addressing whether the burden or expense of satisfying the entire request was proportionate to the likely benefit
Electronic Data Involved: Email stored on backup tapes
Key Insight: Trial court abused its discretion in ordering parties to share costs of requested discovery equally, and should have ordered the requesting party to bear full cost where requested information should have been available in the requesting party?s own records, and the request involved the creation of a report that otherwise did not exist, and had to be specially created by a nonparty contractor at significant cost
Nature of Case: Suit to recover fees improperly assessed pursuant to Motor Vehicle Emission Inspection and Maintenance Act
Electronic Data Involved: Special report extracted from massive database of information
Key Insight: City employees? personal email not subject to disclosure under public records law because it fell outside the state’s statutory definition of public records; mere placement of such email on government-owned computer system does not transform such email into a “public record”
Nature of Case: Suit by newspaper to access city employees’ emails under public records law; issue was certified to Florida Supreme Court as “question of great public importance”
Electronic Data Involved: Personal email stored on government-owned computers
Key Insight: Court did not abuse discretion in denying request for computer tapes where requesting party already possessed all information from tapes on wage cards and were not deprived of any data
Electronic Data Involved: Computer tapes containing wage information
Key Insight: Where evidence showed there was no feasible and economic electronic means by which certain data could be produced, court ruled that, to the extent defendants intended to introduce evidence related to such data at trial, defendants would be required to produce all such evidence, documentary, electronic or otherwise, upon which they intend to rely
Nature of Case: Class action
Electronic Data Involved: Information regarding damages, offsets and class member eligibility
Key Insight: Email stored in government computers does not automatically become public records by virtue of that storage; private or personal email fell outside the statutory definition of “public records”
Nature of Case: Newspaper sued city to release as public record all email sent from or received by two city employees
Electronic Data Involved: Email
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