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: 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: Where plaintiff demonstrated that allowing defendant unrestricted access to database would result in a clearly defined and serious injury, court held that plaintiff’s “confidential – attorneys’ eyes only” designation was appropriate and denied motion to compel
Nature of Case: Contract dispute
Electronic Data Involved: Database containing research data
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: Parties agreed to narrow the scope of archived email search, both in terms of the number of employees whose email was to be produced and the number of days per month for which that email was to be produced; defendants to bear cost of production ($130,000) initially, but court reserved decision about who ultimately would bear cost; court denied plaintiff’s request that defendant make its production available on CD-ROM
Nature of Case: Antitrust
Electronic Data Involved: Archived email
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: District court upheld magistrate’s order requiring defendants to produce all responsive electronic information in native format
Nature of Case: Securities class action
Electronic Data Involved: Emails
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: Employer entitled to discover, at its own expense, copies of database on computer disk, code books and user manual created by EEOC’s expert from information produced by employer to allow for effective cross-examination of EEOC’s expert; in addition, employer to pay “fair portion of the fees and expenses incurred” in the past by EEOC for the expert’s work in encoding the requested data and formulating the database
Nature of Case: Consolidated Title VII action brought by individual and EEOC
Electronic Data Involved: Database created by EEOC’s expert from information produced by employer
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