Key Insight: Finding representative parts/assumptions sanctions imposed by magistrate to be moderate, fair, and narrowly tailored to redress defendant’s discovery violations, district court upheld sanctions with slight modifications
Nature of Case: Patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: Schematics, completion reports, netlists and other technical documents
Key Insight: Trial court properly imposed terminating sanctions against plaintiff for egregious discovery abuses, including the deletion of files from hard drives after plaintiff had stipulated that computers and diskettes would not be operated or touched until defendants’ computer expert could examine them
Nature of Case: Breach of contract
Electronic Data Involved: Hard drive, computer files
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 denied plaintiff’s motion to compel defendants to provide affidavits of all employees with access to employment databases and hiring practices, in order to establish whether any documents or data was destroyed, since discovery had been closed for one year and there was no evidence that defendants had destroyed documents
Nature of Case: Employment discrimination
Electronic Data Involved: Hiring and employment database and records
Key Insight: Court ordered AOL to reveal the identities of its anonymous subscribers who had transmitted offensive emails and instant messages where plaintiff had established that: (1) she had a prima facie basis for asserting criminal or civil liability against the anonymous authors; (2) the identifying information was relevant to her claims and necessary to obtain redress; (3) she was seeking the information in good faith and not for an improper purpose; and (4) she was unable to obtain the identifying information by alternative means
Nature of Case: Individual sued ISP seeking disclosure of identities of subscribers who sent her offensive email and instant messages
Electronic Data Involved: Identities of subscribers
Key Insight: Where there were gaps in plaintiff’s production of email, administrative law judge granted motion to compel production of email from plaintiff’s backup tapes but ordered parties to share the costs of such production
Nature of Case: Case before the U.S. International Trade Commission
Electronic Data Involved: Email
Key Insight: Court ordered defendant to produce to plaintiff information in the possession of a third party storage facility, with each side paying one-half of the charges billed by the third party for retrieving the information; court further ruled that the prevailing party would be entitled to recover from the losing party its share of the costs associated with retrieval of the information
Nature of Case: FLSA claim
Electronic Data Involved: Electronic documents
Key Insight: Sanctions not warranted where plaintiffs made ?tenuous allegation? without any specific evidentiary support that defendants had implemented a new email document retention policy after litigation was commenced and that potentially relative emails may have been destroyed pursuant to the policy
Nature of Case: Claimed violations of the anti-fraud provisions of the Securities and Exchange Acts
Electronic Data Involved: Email
Key Insight: Plaintiff ordered to produce portions of database relied upon by its expert for 24 customers at issue in the litigation; but plaintiff need not produce or disclose remainder of 790-customer database unless otherwise ordered by the court
Nature of Case: Business litigation
Electronic Data Involved: Customer data
Key Insight: Where defendants had actual notice of allegations against them and affirmatively stated that they were fully aware of their preservation obligations under PSLRA and sanctions for failure to comply, court declined to enter preservation order
Nature of Case: Securities litigation
Electronic Data Involved: Documents, data compilations (including electronically recorded or stored data), and tangible objects
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