Case Summaries – Page 405 – Electronic Discovery Law

United States v. Rigas, 281 F. Supp. 2d 733 (S.D.N.Y. 2003)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Court ruled that no work product waiver occurred when entire computer network account of USAO paralegal was inadvertently copied onto working copy of hard drive held by prosecution as evidence and made available to defense; defense motion to retain privileged documents denied

Nature of Case: Criminal charges of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud and securities fraud

Electronic Data Involved: Privileged documents on computer hard drive

In re Worldcom, Inc. Sec. Litig., 2004 WL 1068032 (S.D.N.Y. May 13, 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Parties ordered to resolve, within five days, scope of electronic discovery to be made by each plaintiff through the completion of the meet and confer process; if no resolution reached, hearing to be held six days later to resolve outstanding issues

Nature of Case: Individual securities fraud actions

Electronic Data Involved: Electronic discovery

Markham v. Nat’l States Ins. Co., 2004 WL 3019308 (W.D. Okla. Jan. 8, 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: After jury awarded plaintiffs $225,000 in compensatory and punitive damages, court considered as a post-judgment matter the issue of whether to impose sanctions against defendant for discovery abuse, allowing parties to conduct further discovery on the impact of defendant’s noncompliance and scheduling an evidentiary hearing on the issue

Nature of Case: Heirs of insured sued insurance company for breach of duty of good faith and fair dealing, false representation and deceit

Electronic Data Involved: Computerized claims information

Drnek v. Variable Annuity Life Ins. Co., 2004 WL 1098919 (D. Ariz. May 4, 2004)

Dec 01 2004

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

McCabe v. Ernst & Young, LLP, 221 F.R.D. 423 (D.N.J. 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Magistrate recommended that non-parties’ motion for attorneys’ fees and other costs incurred in appearing for depositions and responding to subpoenas be denied, since non-parties failed to object to subpoenas or condition compliance on reimbursement, and an award of $58,000, without notice to plaintiffs, would be tantamount to severe prejudice

Electronic Data Involved: Email and hard copy documents

Benton v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2001 WL 210685 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 26, 2001)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Plaintiff’s ex parte motion to continue summary judgment and for additional discovery of defendant’s computer system denied where prior Rule 56(f) continuance had been granted and no showing was made of specific evidence expected to be elicited

Nature of Case: Insureds sued insurer for breach of covenant of good faith and fair dealing and related torts

Electronic Data Involved: Insurer’s claims-handling computer system

City of New York v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp., 222 F.R.D. 51 (E.D.N.Y. 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Court denied BATF’s motion to quash subpoenas since firearms tracing and licensing data maintained by BATF in federal databases was relevant and would be subject to a confidentiality order, and disclosure of the data was not precluded by appropriations statute or by law enforcement privilege

Nature of Case: City and families of shooting victims sued manufacturers, distributors and retailers of weapons

Electronic Data Involved: Database maintained by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

Daewoo Elecs. Co. v. United States, 650 F. Supp. 1003 (Ct. Int’l Trade 1986)

Dec 01 2004

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

Georgia Emission Testing Co. v. Reheis, 602 S.E.2d 153 (Ga. Ct. App. 2004)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Trial court abused its discretion in ordering parties to share costs of requested discovery equally, and should have ordered the requesting party to bear full cost where requested information should have been available in the requesting party?s own records, and the request involved the creation of a report that otherwise did not exist, and had to be specially created by a nonparty contractor at significant cost

Nature of Case: Suit to recover fees improperly assessed pursuant to Motor Vehicle Emission Inspection and Maintenance Act

Electronic Data Involved: Special report extracted from massive database of information

Hines v. Widnall, 183 F.R.D. 596 (N.D. Fla. 1998)

Dec 01 2004

Key Insight: Granting plaintiff’s’ motion to compel production of computerized images of employment records which were created to facilitate review of the documents by geographically-dispersed defense counsel, court held that images did not constitute attorney work product since images did not contain mental impressions or legal theories and would not give plaintiffs insight into defense strategy or opinions; plaintiffs to pay only nominal copying costs and not portion of $250,000 imaging cost incurred by defendant

Nature of Case: Race discrimination

Electronic Data Involved: Computerized images of employment records

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