In re: 3M Combat Arms Earplug Prods. Liab. Litig. (N.D. Fla., Oct. 2020)
Key Insight: In their discovery requests, Defendants sought data concerning the Plaintiff’s use of social media and text messages concerning matters relevant to the litigation. After Plaintiff provided responses to these discovery requests, Defendants filed a Motion to Compel Plaintiff to submit to a forensic examination of his mobile phone. Defendants based their Motion on the arguments of ensuring complete collection of data from the mobile phone, and more specifically, complete data of Plaintiff’s use of social media messaging and text messaging with several parties on said mobile phone.
The Court denied Defendants’ Motion because it found that the electronic stored information (ESI) already produced was complete and/or sufficient due to the Plaintiff already working with an ESI expert to obtain the requested data, particularly from the mobile device. In short, the Defendants’ lacked a sufficient reason to believe that the data already produced was not complete.
Similarly, the Defendants failed to demonstrate that a forensic examination of the mobile device would produce relevant data showing that Plaintiff had a pattern or practice of deleting the above mentioned messages. Moreover, the data produced by the examination would only show that a message was deleted, not when or why the message(s) were deleted, the contents of the message(s), or a pattern of deleting messages. In sum, the Court found that the requested forensic examination would be “disproportionate to the slight importance” it would provide to the litigation.
Nature of Case: Product Liability
Electronic Data Involved: Cellular Phone, Text Messages, Social Media, Social Media Messages,