Email – Page 2 – Bow Tie Law

eDiscovery Does Not Mean Esoteric Discovery

June 16, 2012 Josh Gilliland Discovery, e-Discovery, Electronically Stored Information, Email, ESI, ethics, Reasonably Accessible, Undue Burden

News Am. Mktg. In-Store Servs., is a breach of contract case involving multiple eDiscovery disputes. According to the Plaintiff, the Defendant did the following: Destroyed relevant email evidence, including an email server; Failed to produce responsive documents in discovery due to the above failure; and Failed to run appropriate ESI searches[…]

Writ of Mandamus & Search of Personal Hard Drive

June 11, 2012 Josh Gilliland e-Discovery, Electronically Stored Information, Email, ESI, Search Terms

A Plaintiff sought a writ of mandamus after a trial court ordered the production of the Plaintiff’s personal computer and email accounts. The Court of Appeals of Texas granted the writ. In re Jordan, 364 S.W.3d 425 (Tex. App. Dallas 2012). The case involved claims of a sexually hostile work[…]

Reasonable Particularity in Requesting ESI

August 29, 2011 Josh Gilliland Discovery, e-Discovery, Electronically Stored Information, Email, ESI

In an age discrimination suit, a Plaintiff’s motion to compel discovery was denied by a Magistrate Judge on the grounds the requests were overboard. The Plaintiff challenged Magistrate’s order. The District Court found the requests were also overboard. Doubt v. NCR Corp., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 95518, 11-12 (N.D. Cal.[…]

Arguing $2,630 is Undue Burden to Search ESI

August 24, 2011 Josh Gilliland Document Review, e-Discovery, Electronically Stored Information, Email, ESI, Request for Production

A Defendant refused to produce ESI claiming the estimated $2,630.00 to search the data was unduly burdensome under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rules 26(b)(2)(C)(iii) and 26(b)(2)(B). Hudson v. AIH Receivable Mgmt. Servs., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 39993 (D. Kan. Apr. 13, 2011). The Defendant was a company of 13[…]

A Standard for Undue Burden: Excruciating, But Highly Educational and Useful, Detail

March 9, 2011 Josh Gilliland De-Dupe, Discovery, Duty to Preserve, e-Discovery, Electronically Stored Information, Email, ESI, Imaging Hard Drives, Processing, Reasonably Accessible

Discovery Balancing Acts in a War Zone United States ex rel. McBride v. Halliburton Co., is a qui tam action over alleged fraudulent billing for services provided to the US military in Iraq. The case involved inflated headcounts in Morale, Welfare and Recreation (“MWR”) facilities and fraudulent billing for those costs to[…]

A Civil Procedure Car Crash

February 24, 2011 Josh Gilliland Back-up Tape, Civil Procedure, e-Discovery, Electronically Stored Information, Email, ESI, Initial Disclosures

A short Civil Procedure Overview: 1) A protective order must correspond to a discovery request; and 2) A motion to compel needs to have an underlying request. In an auto-recall case, the Plaintiff had produced 1.79 million pages of documents in discovery, plus an additional 84,000 pages of documents from[…]

Production of Litigation Hold Letters & Imaging Hard Drives

January 10, 2011 Josh Gilliland Duty to Preserve, e-Discovery, Electronically Stored Information, Email, Imaging Hard Drives

In an action initiated by an insurance company, the Defendant sought various discovery from the Plaintiff. Am. Gen. Life Ins. Co. v. Billard, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 138570 (N.D. Iowa Dec. 29, 2010). Two issues pertained to the production of litigation hold letters and forensically imaging hard drives. Litigation Hold Letters The[…]

Burning the Cost of Production & Review

December 8, 2010 Josh Gilliland Discovery, e-Discovery, Email, Meet & Confer, Metadata

Everyone got burned in this case, including the Court, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and especially Rule 1. Brinckerhoff v. Town of Paradise, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 126895 (E.D. Cal. Nov. 18, 2010). On a positive note, the Court was innovative enough to cited Google Maps in a footnote[…]

Cooking with Undue Burden & Metadata

November 23, 2010 Josh Gilliland e-Discovery, Electronically Stored Information, Email, ESI, Metadata, TIFF, Undue Burden

In a business dispute, the Plaintiffs sought the production of email messages in native file format with metadata. The successor counsel to the Defendant claimed producing as TIFF’s would be sufficient, because the ESI was “no longer available in native format.” Moreover, the Defendant claimed producing metadata was “unnecessary and[…]

Quashing Subpoenas with the Stored Communication Act

November 4, 2010 Josh Gilliland Email, Stored Communications Act

In a lawsuit over the death of a prison inmate, the Plaintiff served Yahoo with a subpoena for all of the Defendant’s email for a period of nearly two years. Janice Chasten v. Franklin, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 113284 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 14, 2010). The Defendant moved to quash the[…]