Key Insight: Production of an plaintiff employee’s own entire email box of 13 years is overbroad and not proportional
Nature of Case: Employment discrimination, whistleblower protection
Electronic Data Involved: Electronic documents generally
Keywords: proportional, 13 years,
Key Insight: E-mail request must be proportional to the evidentiary needs of the case.
Nature of Case: Request for Production
Electronic Data Involved: e-mail
Keywords: DDJR, “tactical” gamesmanship, Van’s earing statements, Allison,
Key Insight: if the balance of the discovery requests outweighed their benefit
Nature of Case: Breach of contract, breach of covenant of good faith and fair dealing, fraud , negligent misrepresentation, declaratory relief and unfair competition.
Electronic Data Involved: responses of three interrogatories in light of changes to rule 26
Keywords: proportionality, motion to compel, balance of request, benefit of requested discovery
Key Insight: forensic imaging of USB drive of handwritten notes and reopening of deposition for questioning regarding the notes
Nature of Case: Employment Discrimination
Electronic Data Involved: handwritten notes from plantiff
Keywords: delaying tactics, reopening deposition, disclosure of evidence at deposition, relevancy
Key Insight: Court denied motion to compel Defendant to search for documents from non-U.S. points of sale where the court found such documents would be of ?marginal relevance at best? and that the burden and expense of production outweighed the benefit, noting that such production would ?vastly expand? an already voluminous production, would entail additional translation costs, and would ?potentially require the involvement of additional entities or foreign law??; court also declined to compel Defendant to conduct searches of Account Representatives for 170 different airlines where Plaintiff failed to establish that the expanded search would reveal additional relevant information and noting that the productions of third party air carriers had not revealed any ?glaring deficiencies? in Defendant?s production
Nature of Case: Class action
Electronic Data Involved: ESI
Key Insight: Applying the proportionality factors in Rule 26(b)(1) (including specific contemplation of Defendants? ?corporate resources? and the ?potentially very large? amount in controversy) and reasoning that the Sixth Circuit has held that ?limiting the scope of discovery is appropriate when compliance ?would prove unduly burdensome,? not merely time-consuming or expensive? and that Defendants failed to propose an alternative method of discovery ?enabling some lesser degree of production,? the court directed the parties to cooperate and indicated it would schedule a conference to discuss ?whether and to what extent discovery should proceed in phases?
Nature of Case: Putative class action re: design or manufacturing defect
Electronic Data Involved: ESI
Key Insight: Court addressed motion to compel and held that requests were burdensome, disproportionate to the needs of the case, and irrelevant to Plaintiff?s claims reasoning that Plaintiff?s requests for ?nearly unlimited access to People?s editorial files? would ?extend far beyond the scope of Plaintiff?s claims and would significantly burden Defendants?
Nature of Case: Employment litigation
Electronic Data Involved: ESI
Key Insight: Where Defendants identified 38 potential email custodians who may possess relevant ESI but proposed to load the emails of only ten custodians to save money and ?facilitate the predictive coding process? and where Plaintiff indicated that Defendant refused to informally disclose information sufficient to evaluate the importance of each custodian, the court briefly opined re: e-Discovery and the lack of any guarantee that all relevant documents will be found and then, reasoning that it had no evidence with which to weigh the likelihood that the 28 ?tangential custodians? would have relevant information but that in ?a high value? case the burden of $18,000 (the amount Defendant proposed to save) did not outweigh the potential benefit to Plaintiff of receiving the emails, declined Defendants? request to limit custodians; regarding cost-shifting, the court ordered that if the search of the 28 additional custodians returned fewer than 500 responsive documents Plaintiff would bear the cost of loading the materials but that if more than 500 were identified, Defendant would bear the costs
Nature of Case: Patent infringement
Electronic Data Involved: Email
Key Insight: Court denied motion for protective order where Defendant?s ?general assertions of hardship and burden? re: the at-issue search were insufficient to justify a protective order, and explained that they had ?offered no affidavits or evidence of any kind to substantiate the general assertion of ?disruption? to their business? and had not ?shown with specificity that the proposed search would cause and undue burden and is thus improper?
Nature of Case: TCPA, FCPA
Electronic Data Involved: Allegedly burdensome search of ESI
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