Key Insight: Court narrowed scope of subpoena and ordered plaintiff and third party to negotiate a reasonable “sample” protocol and search protocol to expedite production, limit the burden and perhaps develop information to return to court to refine the court’s ruling
Nature of Case: Securities class action
Electronic Data Involved: Spreadsheets
Key Insight: Denying plaintiff’s motion for entry of default judgment as sanction for tardy production of documents, court found that plaintiff had suffered little prejudice from delay and that defendant had worked diligently, did not willfully withhold responsive documents, and did not improperly modify or delete files froom hard drive before voluntarily producing it
Electronic Data Involved: Hard drive
Key Insight: Court granted plaintiffs’ motion to compel production of defendant’s current computerized master payroll file and all computer print-outs for W-2 forms of defendant’s employees, given accuracy of records and inexpensiveness of production
Nature of Case: Race discrimination
Electronic Data Involved: Computerized master payroll file
Key Insight: Order memorialized parties’ agreement regarding motion to compel: defendants agreed to produce all emails that exist in printed form, but would not conduct search of electronic database to retrieve emails since it would be cost prohibitive; defendant understood it would be precluded from offering evidence at trial that was not properly disclosed in discovery
Nature of Case: Employment discrimination
Electronic Data Involved: Email
Key Insight: Where defendant resisted production of technical specifications in electronic form because material had already been produced at great expense in hard copy form, magistrate ruled that defendant must allow plaintiff’s expert to view material in electronic form at defendant’s facility during regular business hours under and such further terms and conditions as the parties agree
Nature of Case: Patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: Technical specifications
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: 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
Key Insight: Where evidence showed there was no feasible and economic electronic means by which certain data could be produced, court ruled that, to the extent defendants intended to introduce evidence related to such data at trial, defendants would be required to produce all such evidence, documentary, electronic or otherwise, upon which they intend to rely
Nature of Case: Class action
Electronic Data Involved: Information regarding damages, offsets and class member eligibility
Key Insight: Where, after months of discovery disputes, reports upon which defendant urged plaintiff to rely in lieu of full database turned out to be inaccurate, court denied plaintiff’s motion for entry of default judgment for discovery abuse and instead postponed trial so that defendant could produce accurate information; however, court imposed monetary sanctions against defendant representing plaintiff’s legal and expert fees for time spent working with inaccurate data
Nature of Case: Employment discrimination
Electronic Data Involved: Database, reports, electronic data
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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