Knotty Issues of eDiscovery
One lesson from United States v. Univ. of Neb. at Kearney, is that maybe you should take depositions of key parties and use interrogatories to find out relevant information to your case before asking for over 40,000 records that contain the personal information of unrelated third-parties to a lawsuit. The[…]
Read moreExxonMobil Pipeline had a problem in discovery: their discovery responses were overdue. The requests for production was served in November 2013 and due after one extension in January 2014. The Plaintiffs rightly brought a motion to compel. The Defendants had enough discovery to give most eDiscovery attorneys a migraine with[…]
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Fighting over discovery search methodology makes me think of President Richard Nixon’s resignation speech: “Always remember, there are those who hate you. And the only way to keep them from winning is to hate them right back. And then you destroy yourself.” Attacking a party who used predictive coding to[…]
Read moreDrafting discovery is an art. While painting in oils or pastels is certainly more colorful than drafting requests in Times New Roman or Ariel, both require thought. And like any masterpiece, drafting a request for production can have its challenges. A Requesting Party demanded an opposing party produce “[a]ll email and[…]
Read moreRequesting social media relevant to a lawsuit should be done as standard operating procedure now. However, some attorney have a difficult time with narrowing their requests beyond, “Produce your Facebook profile.” Such fishing expeditions are summarily denied. See, Tompkins v. Detroit Metro. Airport, 278 F.R.D. 387 ( E.D. Mich. 2012),[…]
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A producing party claimed that it was “impossible” to produce Gmail in Native File Format because, “Gmail account user and Google does not permit its users to copy e-mails and documents in native format.” As such, the Defendant produced the gmail emails by forwarding them to the Plaintiff. Sexton v.[…]
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Can a producing party argue for cost-shifting to the defendant based on proportionality for the production of work-related emails on a plaintiff’s gmail account? Owens v. Clear Wireless LLC, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 26698, 4-6 (D. Minn. Mar. 3, 2014). Short answer is no, because the emails are not inaccessible[…]
Read moreJudge Paul Cherry wrote a masterful opinion involving an EEOC motion to compel production of agreed upon production formats. The case is an excellent example of the issues very alive over the form of production, understanding technology, educating the Court with expert affidavits, and the value of the meet and[…]
Read moreAnderson Living Trust v. WPX Energy Prod., LLC, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 31025, 3-4 (D.N.M. Mar. 6, 2014), is a detailed review of production requirements under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 34(b)(2)(E). The crux of the case centered on whether scanning paper documents to PDF’s made the discovery “electronically[…]
Read moreDefendants in a discovery dispute produced data from a timekeeping database as PDF’s. The Plaintiffs objected, arguing their expert would need to spend 300 to 500 hours converting the PDF’s into a database. The Defendants countered that it would take a team of three to four people between three to[…]
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