Format Of Production – Page 36 – Electronic Discovery Law

TPS, Inc. v. U.S. Dept. of Defense, 330 F.3d 1191 (9th Cir. 2003)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Reversing summary judgment for DOD, court stated that relevant inquiry as to whether an agency must provide information in requested format is whether, in general, a requested format is one that is “readily reproducible” by the agency, benchmarked against the agency’s “normal business as usual approach” with respect to reproducing data in the ordinary course of the agency’s business (not limited solely to the context of FOIA requests)

Nature of Case: FOIA action

Electronic Data Involved: Two electronic files in “zipped” format

Cornell Research Found., Inc. v. Hewlett Packard Co., 223 F.R.D. 55 (N.D.N.Y. 2003)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Where defendant resisted production of technical specifications in electronic form because material had already been produced at great expense in hard copy form, magistrate ruled that defendant must allow plaintiff’s expert to view material in electronic form at defendant’s facility during regular business hours under and such further terms and conditions as the parties agree

Nature of Case: Patent infringement

Electronic Data Involved: Technical specifications

Uniroyal Chem. Co. Inc. v. Syngenta Crop Protection, 224 F.R.D. 53 (D. Conn. 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Where plaintiff demonstrated that allowing defendant unrestricted access to database would result in a clearly defined and serious injury, court held that plaintiff’s “confidential – attorneys’ eyes only” designation was appropriate and denied motion to compel

Nature of Case: Contract dispute

Electronic Data Involved: Database containing research data

Daewoo Elecs. Co. v. United States, 650 F. Supp. 1003 (Ct. Int’l Trade 1986)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Zenith’s motion to compel granted, requiring production in usable form of SAS data sets, constituting final refined forms of data used to compute final results; court criticized government’s inordinately restrictive interpretation of its discovery obligations: “To say that the data sets into which the computer tapes were transferred are not governed by an order speaking of computer tapes is as if someone had said at the dawn of the era of typewriters that typed documents are not governed by a court order speaking of ‘writings.'”

Nature of Case: Proceeding to review Dept. of Commerce’s review of antidumping duty order regarding television sets

Electronic Data Involved: Data sets

United States v. Visa USA, Inc., 1999 WL 476437 (S.D.N.Y. Jul. 7, 1999)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Parties agreed to narrow the scope of archived email search, both in terms of the number of employees whose email was to be produced and the number of days per month for which that email was to be produced; defendants to bear cost of production ($130,000) initially, but court reserved decision about who ultimately would bear cost; court denied plaintiff’s request that defendant make its production available on CD-ROM

Nature of Case: Antitrust

Electronic Data Involved: Archived email

Georgia Emission Testing Co. v. Reheis, 602 S.E.2d 153 (Ga. Ct. App. 2004)

Dec 01 2004

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

In re Verisign, Inc. Sec. Litig., 2004 WL 2445243 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 10, 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: District court upheld magistrate’s order requiring defendants to produce all responsive electronic information in native format

Nature of Case: Securities class action

Electronic Data Involved: Emails

Glover v. Standard Fed. Bank, 2001 WL 34635710 (D. Minn. Nov. 9, 2001)

Dec 01 2004

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

Williams v. DuPont, 119 F.R.D. 648 (W.D. Ky. 1987)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Employer entitled to discover, at its own expense, copies of database on computer disk, code books and user manual created by EEOC’s expert from information produced by employer to allow for effective cross-examination of EEOC’s expert; in addition, employer to pay “fair portion of the fees and expenses incurred” in the past by EEOC for the expert’s work in encoding the requested data and formulating the database

Nature of Case: Consolidated Title VII action brought by individual and EEOC

Electronic Data Involved: Database created by EEOC’s expert from information produced by employer

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