Motion to Compel – Page 53 – Electronic Discovery Law

Vicente v. City of Prescott, No. CV-11-08204-PCT-DGC, 2014 WL 3894131 (D. Ariz. Aug. 8, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Although court found City’s preservation efforts “plainly deficient,” as City did not notify its IT department to suspend automatic procedure for eliminating deleted emails after 30 days, nor did it instruct its IT department to assist key individuals in collecting and preserving relevant email or provide assistance in doing so from the legal department, court decline to impose case-dispositive sanctions against City because plaintiff did not discuss the bad faith standard nor show how it was satisfied, and loss of only one email did not constitute significant prejudice where plaintiff collected and presented good deal of evidence on same issue; court granted plaintiff?s motion to compel production of unredacted versions of two litigation hold letters sent by the City to its employees

Nature of Case: Fire Captain alleged claims of retaliation in violation of the First Amendment and state law claims for defamation and injunctive relief

Electronic Data Involved: Email

Finkle v. Howard Cnty., Md., No. SAG?13?3236, 2014 WL 6835628, (D. Md. Dec. 2, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: District Court granted Defendant?s Motion for Protective Order and denied Plaintiff?s Motion to Compel, finding that Plaintiff?s Interrogatory seeking the identification of all email accounts, social media services, internet discussion groups, cellular telephone or text messaging services used by certain County employees from January 2010 through the present, for the purpose of issuing a subpoena to the appropriate service providers, would impose an undue burden on Defendant and that Plaintiff was not lawfully entitled to the content of those accounts under the Stored Communications Act (?SCA?); regarding its reliance on the SCA, the court specifically reasoned that ?there is no reason to invite an unfettered ?fishing expedition? into the personal communications of non-party employees without a viable reason to believe that relevant information would be accessible to Plaintiff or would be contained therein.?

Nature of Case: Employment Discrimination (Title VII)

Electronic Data Involved: Account information for all email, social media (e.g., Facebook, MySpace), discussion groups, text messaging services, etc.

Georgel v. Preece, No. 0:13-CV-57-DLB, 2014 WL 12647776 (E.D. Ky. Feb. 28, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Court denied without prejudice Defendant?s motion to compel production of Plaintiff?s social media records absent a ?factual predicate? upon which to do so, i.e., a presentation of some factual basis that the social media pages would reveal relevant information, but declined to say that Defendant must provide information from Plaintiff?s public pages to satisfy the threshold burden for establishing relevance

Nature of Case: Personal injury

Electronic Data Involved: Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn)

Galena St. Fund, LP v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., No. 12-cv-00587-BNB-KMT, 2014 WL 943115 (D. Colo. Mar. 10, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Applying FRE 502, court rejected plaintiff?s argument that defendant waived attorney-client privilege by producing 150 privileged documents among production totaling some 208,000 documents consisting of over 2.2 million pages, as defendant established an elaborate protocol for review and production of documents and took reasonable steps to prevent disclosure of privileged documents, demonstrated that the production was inadvertent, and took reasonable steps to rectify the error with reasonable promptness

Lozoya v. Allphase Landscape Constr., Inc., No. 12-cv-1048-JLK, 2014 WL 222068 (D. Colo. Jan. 21, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: In case where defendants estimated: (1) production costs for discovery from computers and smart phones would run $35,000 to $45,000 for uploading and processing of data, and (2) plaintiffs’ potential recovery as between $10,350 to $29,700, court granted plaintiffs’ motion to compel finding that plaintiffs’ conduct was far more accommodating and professional than defendants’ and that production in Bates numbered .pdf format would not place undue burden on defendants

Nature of Case: Employment litigation

Electronic Data Involved: ESI, emails, texts

XL Specialty Ins. Co. v. Bollinger Shipyards, Inc., No. 12-2071, 2014 WL 295053 (E.D. La. Jan 27, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Court rejected plaintiff’s complaints regarding format of defendant’s production of documents, because plaintiff failed to make any Rule 34(b)(2)(B) ESI specification in its discovery requests and defendant’s production of scanned images on OCR readable disc was a reasonably usable form; court ordered defendant to explain its document naming and numbering system to the extent it had not already done so, but denied any additional logistical relief, stating: ?Whatever burden XL and its counsel face in reviewing these materials that they themselves have requested is rightfully borne by them.?

Nature of Case: Insurance coverage

Electronic Data Involved: Database of more than 808,000 documents consisting of more than four million pages

In re Uehling, No. 1:14-mc-00009-LJO-BAM, 2014 WL 1577459 (E.D. Cal. Apr. 17, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Court denied defendant’s motion to compel nonparty to answer deposition questions and produce documents, finding that nonparty’s burden of producing copy of external hard drive containing 9.47 gigabytes of information was substantial as the material would need to be reviewed for privilege and for potential redaction and withholding based on confidentiality, privacy and proprietary information purposes, the benefit of the documents to defendant was “minimal,” and defendant had an alternative source for the information sought (i.e., the plaintiff)

Nature of Case: Insurance coverage dispute

Electronic Data Involved: Hard drive that non-party witness provided to DOJ in the course of the DOJ’s investigation of plaintiff

A & R Body Specialty & Collision Works, Inc. v. Progressive Cas. Ins. Co., No. 3:07CV929 (WWE), 2014 WL 4437684 (D. Conn. Sep. 9, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Magistrate judge denied as moot defendants’ request for plaintiffs’ consent to release emails stored with third party vendors Earthlink and AT&T in light of vendors? representations that, when an Earthlink.net or ATT.net user deletes an email from Outlook, the email simultaneously is deleted from the vendor’s server and cannot be recovered; magistrate judge also denied plaintiffs’ request for defendants to produce a merged data set, where one data set had 157 columns and was extracted from third-party provider?s system, and second set had more information but used different field identifiers, since a party cannot be compelled to create a document for its production and the creation of requested data compilation would inherently require the creation of a ?document,? and producing party is not required to produce ESI in more than one form

Nature of Case: Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act claims

Electronic Data Involved: Email, data

M Seven Sys. Ltd. v. Leap Wireless Int?l, Inc., No. 12cv01424 CAB (RBB), 2014 WL 3942200 (S.D. Cal. Aug. 11, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Court denied plaintiff’s motion for an order to show cause why the defendants should not be held in contempt for failing to all historical versions of source code for each cell phone model at issue, finding that magistrate judge’s discovery order did not preclude more than one reasonable interpretation of its scope, that defendants reasonably interpreted and substantially complied with the order by producing every version of the source code that they possessed

Nature of Case: Plaintiff alleged misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, violation of California Penal Code ? 502, unfair competition, civil conspiracy to misappropriate trade secrets, and civil conspiracy to unfairly compete

Electronic Data Involved: Various versions of source code

Johnson v. Allstate Prop. & Cas. Ins. Co., No. C 14-5064, 2014 WL 7377198 (W.D. Wash. Dec. 29, 2014)

Dec 01 2014

Key Insight: Addressing Defendant?s claims that the emails of thirty-four employees previously identified by Defendant as potentially having responsive information were not reasonably accessible, the court indicated that Defendant?s declaration in support of that claim was ?of limited value? where it made only broad claims regarding the potential time it could take to search each computer but failed to account for the actual time taken to search the computers of the four primary adjusters for a prior production but acknowledged it was ?extremely difficult? to conclude that all thirty-four employees had ?significant, relevant discoverable emails or documents? and thus ordered the search and production of one custodian revealed in deposition to have been involved in the at-issue denial of coverage and that Plaintiff could choose 10 additional employees? computers to be searched based on Defendant?s court-ordered description of each employees? job and the type of documents they were likely to maintain

Nature of Case: Insurance litigation

Electronic Data Involved: Emails

Tag:Motion to Compel