Key Insight: Cell phone important to case was thrown against wall and destroyed after failed romantic encounter
Nature of Case: personal injury
Electronic Data Involved: cell phone activity data
Keywords: “he threw the cellular telephone against the wall after a failed romantic encounter”, “possibly using some other app”, “near-fatal tractor-trailer collision”
Key Insight: Third party provided date limited information to Plaintiff, Defendant sought entire image; Date Limited information provided to Plaintiff was all Plaintiff was required to produce.
Nature of Case: Trade Secrets, Bankruptcy, Civil Consipiracy
Electronic Data Involved: Forensic Image of Laptop
Keywords: forensic image; date-limited, third party
Key Insight: if the district court erred in going forward with trial even though all samples were not produced in discovery
Nature of Case: patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: samples of proposed infringing product
Keywords: production of materials, motion to compel production, sufficient evidence
Key Insight: whether there was accessibility problems or undue burden or cost associated with turning over phones and computers for forensic imaging; also, whether it was sufficient to have plaintiff’s employee’s conduct a search for responsive ESI
Nature of Case: breach of contract, tortious interference
Electronic Data Involved: e-mails, phone messages, physical computers and cellphones and their data
Keywords: “former business relationship”, “information may be discoverable even if not ultimately admissible into evidence”, “Allstate, however, agreed to produce responsive information within its custody”
Key Insight: former employee of defendant ordered coworkers to delete case critical emails, even after litigation hold.
Nature of Case: antitrust, Sherman Act
Electronic Data Involved: email
Keywords: 5 million dollar fee award, clear intent, spoliation, litigation hold, permissive adverse inference.
Key Insight: Judges should weigh lesser sanctions before dismissing a case, but are not required to.
Nature of Case: Breach of Contract, Torts
Electronic Data Involved: Tax and bank statements
Keywords: failure to respond, discovery sanctions, discovery misconduct
Key Insight: Court recommended terminating sanctions for Plaintiffs? discovery violations, including failing to produce documents with metadata, as ordered, and failing to provide an explanation; failing to produce other documents as ordered, including a more legible version of a spreadsheet that Plaintiffs created; and falsifying discovery, but declined to recommend additional monetary sanctions
Electronic Data Involved: ESI
Key Insight: Where Plaintiff sought spoliation sanctions for Defendant?s deletion of emails and argued that Defendant intended to keep the at-issue account hidden and deleted emails after it was discovered through another party?s production and that those emails revealed Defendant?s intent to keep the at-issue account hidden and other elements of Plaintiff?s claims, the court found that the deletions were ?intended to deprive Plaintiff of the information? contained within and reasoned that Defendant?s claim that he deleted the emails because of computer performance lacked credibility, but declined to impose default judgment absent a sufficient degree of prejudice and instead ordered that a permissive adverse inference instruction would be given to the jury
Nature of Case: Breach of contract and related claims
Electronic Data Involved: Email
Key Insight: Court affirmed the sanction of default judgment imposed in 2014 by the International Trade Commission for Appellant?s egregious spoliation of evidence in bad faith and in violation of the Administrative Law Judge?s orders (including, among other things, repeatedly overwriting files, backdating a computer?s internal clock to affect metadata, running CCleaner)
Nature of Case: Patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: ESI
Key Insight: Applying the common law, the court imposed a permissive adverse inference and monetary sanctions for Plaintiff?s spoliation of his cellular phone and its contents where Plaintiff claimed a day before he was scheduled to produce it that he had lost his phone months ago but provided no details regarding the loss or his attempts at preservation or recovery of the phone and where the court concluded that Plaintiff made a ?deliberate choice to withhold [the phone] from production? and that Defendants were prejudiced as a result
Nature of Case: Insurance coverage litigation
Electronic Data Involved: Cellular phone and contents
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