Keyword Search – Page 15 – Electronic Discovery Law

Mitchell Eng?g. v. City of San Francisco, 2010 WL 2951856 (N.D. Cal. July 27, 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: Where plaintiff offered to produce hard copy ?job files? for non-city projects as an alternative to conducting key word searching of 25 custodians to identify emails related to non-city projects but where defendant objected that hard copy was less searchable and would not contain all relevant emails, court denied defendant?s motion to compel keyword searching and production of ESI citing the more than two month delay since the issue was first raised, the close proximity of trial, and the court?s inability to determine the relevance of the 188 proposed search terms and ordered plaintiff?s production of hard copy files

Electronic Data Involved: Emails, ESI, hard copy

Edelen v. Campbell Soup Co., 2010 WL 774186 (N.D. Ga. Mar. 2, 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: Court ordered 4 pages of privileged documents be returned to defendants where the pages were privileged on their face and inadvertently produced (4 pages of privileged material were produced among 2000 pages and the documents were subject to review by three attorneys prior to production) and where counsel immediately sought their return upon discovery of their production; court ordered narrowing of search terms and fewer custodians upon defendants? objection to plaintiffs? proposed scope (including 55 custodians and 50 search terms) where plaintiff failed to respond to the objection within the ten day period provided by the court

Nature of Case: Employment litigation

Electronic Data Involved: ESI, privileged materials

Habtegiorgis v. OIC of Washington, 2010 WL 2232142 (E.D. Wash. June 2, 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: Finding plaintiff?s requests ?reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence,? court granted plaintiff?s motion to compel and ordered defendants to produce certain ESI and to allow plaintiffs to search defendant?s server and network using the terms of plaintiff?s choosing and ordered that defendant provide information regarding the creation of backup disks and other evidence; court granted plaintiff?s motion for the costs of bringing the motion

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Eurand, Inc. v. Mylan Pharm., Inc., 266 F.R.D. 79 (D. Del. 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: Evaluating the adequacy of plaintiff?s search for a specific category of information, the court noted that the test to determine the appropriateness of a search is whether the search ?could?have been expected to produce the information requested?, determined that the information sought was likely to be found in the emails of the inventors of a specific patent, and ordered plaintiff to search the emails of the relevant inventors within a date range prescribed by the court; opinion included brief discussion of keyword searching and noted, “[n]either lawyers nor judges are generally qualified to opine that certain search terms or files are more or less likely to produce information than those keywords or data actually used or reviewed.”

Nature of Case: Patent litigation

Electronic Data Involved: Emails

Ross v. Abercrombie & Fitch Co, 2010 WL 1957802 (S.D. Ohio May 14, 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: Where defendant resisted plaintiff?s motion to compel additional searching based upon having already conducted an initial, agreed-upon keyword search and upon unsubstantiated claims that additional searching would be unduly burdensome regardless of prior efforts, court rejected defendant?s arguments absent a sufficient showing of burden, granted plaintiff?s motion, and ordered the parties to meet and confer to reach agreement regarding the searches

Nature of Case: Securities class action

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 2010 WL 1135781 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 22, 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: Addressing several objections to the magistrate?s order compelling production of data from non-parties, court held that despite ?minimal? showing of relevance, magistrate did not err in ordering production of data where magistrate weighed the relevance of the data against the burden alleged and ordered appropriate steps to reduce the burden, including limiting the review of documents to those hit by a small set of search terms, waiving respondents? obligations to produce a privilege log, and allowing one respondent to search only its central server rather than 75 individual hard drives following that respondents? showing of undue burden; court rejected petitioner?s objections to the measures taken to reduce the non-parties? burdens

Nature of Case: Litigation surround California’s Proposition 8

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Martinez-Hernandez v. Butterball LLC, 2010 2089251 (E.D.N.C. May 21, 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: Where plaintiff?s search requests were unreasonable and unduly burdensome and where defendant?s proposed ESI search could ?be reasonably expanded to search for relevant information without becoming unduly burdensome?, court ordered the parties to continue negotiating to identify 25 agreed upon search terms to search relevant custodians? reasonably accessible data; court found backup tapes ?not readily accessible because of undue burden or cost? and ordered defendant to run the agreed upon search terms ?only on reasonably accessible sources, such as active and archived data of network computers?

Nature of Case: Class action

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

URS Corp. v. Isham, 2010 WL 2428841 (D.S.C. June 11, 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: Court granted plaintiff?s motion for preservation and inspection of defendant?s relevant hardware but found plaintiff?s proposed protocol overly burdensome and thus ordered adherence to defendant?s proposed protocol which called for more targeted searches using terms proposed by plaintiff and provided a more reasonable time frame for the production of documents and privilege logs; parties to split the cost

Nature of Case: Claims arising from employees’ departure from plaintiff’s company to join defendant’s

Electronic Data Involved: Hard drives

Moore v. Napolitano, 723 F. Supp. 2d 167 (D.D.C. 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: District court upheld sanction precluding defendant from presenting evidence of non-discriminatory reasons for non-promotion upon a prima facie showing of disparate treatment where defendant failed to conduct a reasonable search for responsive paper documents, despite a court order to do so, including providing ?ambiguous and deficient? search instructions to employees; failing to follow up when employees failed to uncover responsive information; and failing to credibly explain defendant?s search efforts, and where the Magistrate Judge properly concluded the sanction was proportional to the offense(s)

Nature of Case: Putative class action for discriminatory non-promotion

Electronic Data Involved: Hard copy

In re Stern, 321 S.W.3d 828 (Tex. Ct. App. 2010)

Dec 01 2010

Key Insight: On petition for a writ of mandamus, the Supreme Court held that the trial court abused its discretion in ordering petitioner to produce communications between himself and nearly forty individuals where such discovery was not narrowly tailored to avoid the inclusion of ?tenuous information irrelevant to the establishment of jurisdiction? (the subject of petitioner?s special appearance) and held that the trial court abused its discretion in appointing a special master to conduct a forensic examination of petitioner?s hard drive where there was no showing that petitioner had defaulted in his discovery obligations, where there was no showing that a search of the hard drive would recover relevant information (particularly in light of petitioner?s use of web-based email), where the special master was appointed without following the procedures called for by the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, where the special master?s broad authorization to search the hard drives (including the authority to choose search terms) amounted to an ?impermissible fishing expedition?, and where the trial court required no showing of the feasibility of retrieving the data by the party requesting the search

Nature of Case: Defamation

Electronic Data Involved: Emails, hard drive

Tag:Keyword Search