Key Insight: Court found Plaintiff had failed to meet its burden of demonstrating that Kozumi had control over non-party consultant?s emails absent any evidence that defendants could legally compel the non-party to produce the requested documents
Electronic Data Involved: Emails
Key Insight: Court declined to compel production of Plaintiffs? Facebook or other social media pages absent a threshold showing that the accounts would contain information within the scope of discovery but concluded that information stored on Plaintiff?s computer ?could lead reasonably to the discovery of admissible evidence? and required that the parties agree to a word search of Plaintiff?s computer by a neutral third party to ?asses whether Plaintiff?s computer contains relevant information?
Nature of Case: Employment discrimination/harassment
Electronic Data Involved: Facebook and social media, personal computer
Key Insight: Calling defendants collection efforts ?incomplete and somewhat haphazard? where defendant provided no instruction to its chosen custodians regarding the types of documents to search for, whether to check with subordinates, or how to search for documents, the court reopened discovery so that production could ?commence in accordance with the parties? joint ESI plan,? and ordered the parties to meet and confer regarding search terms and an amended scheduling order; court considered proper logging of emails and ordered defendant to produce an amended privilege log that listed each privileged email contained in an email string separately
Nature of Case: Patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: Email, misc. ESI
Key Insight: Magistrate judge evaluated plaintiffs? work product, attorney-client privilege, joint defense and common interest privilege claims, set out various findings and guidelines, and ordered plaintiffs to update their respective privilege logs and produce certain documents; magistrate judge further ruled that, because Ford had earlier produced voluminous documents as they were kept in the usual course of business, it had no further duty under Rule 34 or otherwise to organize and label the documents to correspond with individual requests for production
Nature of Case: Current and former property owners sued former operator of manufactured gas plant
Electronic Data Involved: Environmental investigation, remedy assessment and allocation related documents
Key Insight: Where defendant sought to shift costs based on the expected expense of reviewing and producing the emails which was estimated to be more than $500,000, the court acknowledged that cost could be a legitimate basis for cost shifting under Rule 26(b)(2)(C), but found that the burden of the requested discovery did not outweigh its likely benefit and was not disproportionate to the case and also noted that the defendant had not established that ?a particular level of review is necessary in this case or that a ?claw back? agreement or [FRE] 502 order would not reduce or eliminate the estimated costs?
Electronic Data Involved: Email
Key Insight: Court granted motion to compel inspection and imaging of certain of defendant?s computers/servers/devices in case involving accusations of misappropriation of confidential information by plaintiff?s former employees for the benefit of defendant but also granted defendant a protective order limiting disclosure for ?attorneys? eyes only?
Nature of Case: Missapropriation of confidential information
Electronic Data Involved: ESI
Key Insight: Upon Defendant?s motion to compel production of Plaintiffs? Facebook information/content, the court rejected Plaintiffs? claims that the request violated their right to privacy and the privacy rights of their Facebook ?friends? who had posted on their walls or tagged them in photographs, and ordered the plaintiffs to produce material concerning their claimed injuries and their effects
Nature of Case: Personal Injury
Electronic Data Involved: Facebook
Key Insight: District court adopted magistrate judge?s report and recommendation that plaintiffs? motion for terminating sanctions, based in part on defendants? botched production of database, be denied in light of additional evidence (consisting of supplemental report by defense expert stating that database was not corrupt but merely ?offline,? expert testimony and in-court demonstration of operation of database, and information regarding a prior database crash) presented by the parties after the district court vacated different magistrate judge’s report and recommendation that plaintiffs? motion for terminating sanctions be granted, that defendants? answer be stricken and that a default judgment be entered against defendants; in light of additional evidence, magistrate judge found that (1) defendants did produce a mirror image of the database as ordered by the court and there was no basis for sanctions, and (2) something done to plaintiffs’ copy of the database after it was provided to plaintiffs caused the error message
Nature of Case: Patent infringement and various state-law claims
Electronic Data Involved: ESI, database
Key Insight: Where Plaintiff sought the return of inadvertently produced privileged documents pursuant to the parties? Fed. R. Evid. 502(d) order (which required the production to be inadvertent to fall within the protective order), the court considered the Lois Sportswear factors and determined that Defendant used reasonable precautions to prevent disclosure (including training contract attorneys to identify privilege and employing a quality control team) and made prompt efforts to rectify their error and ultimately concluded privilege was not waived (court noted that waiver was also not established pursuant to Fed. R. Evid. 502(b))
Electronic Data Involved: Privileged ESI
Key Insight: Denial of motion to compel documents reflecting deceased patient?s children?s purchases and calls on the day the patient underwent his at-issue procedure was no abuse of discretion where the request for production was not sufficiently limited in time and was therefore overly broad; request for all posting to social media regarding the patient or his death was also not limited in time and thus ?overly broad on its face? and trial court did not abuse discretion in denying the motion to compel
Nature of Case: Health care liability
Electronic Data Involved: Documents reflecting purchases and calls on a particular day; Facebook/social media postings
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