Key Insight: Despite dismissal of all plaintiffs’ claims and entry of final judgment on the merits, court retained ancillary jurisdiction over plaintiffs’ motion for sanctions for spoliation of electronic evidence for purpose of holding a hearing before ruling on the motion
Nature of Case: Securities class action
Electronic Data Involved: Electronic evidence
Key Insight: Court ruled, reluctantly, that even though defendant had violated protective order relating to use of subject software and database, the order was not sufficiently clear and definite to be enforced by contempt
Nature of Case: Copyright infringement
Electronic Data Involved: Software and database
Key Insight: Where defendants had taken steps to remedy alleged gaps in production by producing new spreadsheets and time remained to remedy any further deficiencies prior to the discovery cut-off, extreme sanction of default judgment was unwarranted
Nature of Case: Breach of contract
Electronic Data Involved: Emails and spreadsheets of sales data
Key Insight: Court declined to impose terminating sanctions and instead ordered an adverse inference sanction against defendant for employee?s intentional spoliation of electronic evidence where the destruction was motivated by an intent to eliminate incriminating evidence but where the prejudice was minimal in light of plaintiff?s ability to obtain copies of the deleted evidence by other means
Nature of Case: Patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets
Electronic Data Involved: ESI, emails
Key Insight: Concluding that plaintiff’s discovery abuse warranted sanctions, district court ruled that appropriate sanction would be to inform the jury about plaintiff’s misconduct, since monetary sanctions previously imposed had not deterred further misconduct and extreme sanction of dismissal was not warranted by the facts
Electronic Data Involved: Breach of distributorship agreement, fraud, unfair trade practices and related torts
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
Key Insight: Granting motion to compel disclosure of all relevant computerized data under former Rule 26(a)(1), court observed: “As used by the advisory committee, ‘computerized data and other electronically-recorded information’ includes, but is not limited to: voice mail messages and files, back-up voice mail files, e-mail messages and files, backup e-mail files, deleted e-mails, data files, program files, backup and archival tapes, temporary files, system history files, web site information stored in textual, graphical or audio format, web site log files, cache files, cookies, and other electronically-recorded information.”
Nature of Case: Copyright infringement (posting of copyrighted photographs on web site)
Electronic Data Involved: All voice mails, email, web sites, web pages, and other relevant electronic data
Key Insight: Plaintiff sanctioned $10,000 for failing to preserve or search email of certain persons; key word search to be narrowed
Nature of Case: Business sued competitors for defamation and unfair competition
Electronic Data Involved: Email, databases (scope of key word search)
Key Insight: Where defendant withheld computerized data and defense expert subsequently used data in rebuttal report, court allowed plaintiffs the opportunity to respond to defendants’ rebuttal expert report, and ruled that defendants would not be allowed opportunity to reply to plaintiffs’ response to the withheld information
Nature of Case: Antitrust
Electronic Data Involved: Computerized transaction data
Key Insight: Although plaintiff’s production of relevant email and other documents in electronic form after the close of discovery demonstrated lack of good faith effort to produce all requested discovery in timely manner, sanctions were not warranted
Nature of Case: Patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: Email and other documents in electronic form
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