Bow Tie Law

Hands-on eDiscovery: California Seminar on Responding to Discovery Requests

I had the good fortune to organize a seminar on responding to electronic discovery requests for the Santa Clara County Bar Association’s Civil Practice Committee on February 27, 2013. However, this seminar was different from other eDiscovery CLE’s, because the attendees spent a full hour conducting searches for responsive ESI[…]

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Always Explain "Why" to the Judge

A Plaintiff brought a motion to compel “access to electronic records,” claiming the Defendants had “withheld electronically stored information” and had not produced a “chronological e-mail history of any kind.” Murray v. Coleman, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 130219, 1-3 (W.D.N.Y. Sept. 12, 2012). The Defense attorney claimed that the Defendant[…]

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Printing ESI & Scanning It Is Not OK

In Indep. Mktg. Group v. Keen, the Defendant-Requesting Party requested the corporate Plaintiff conduct targeted searches with specific key words on specific custodians on the Plaintiff’s server.  Indep. Mktg. Group v. Keen, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 7702 (M.D. Fla. Jan. 24, 2012). The Plaintiff produced one multiple page PDF without[…]

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Smile for the Discovery Production

In a dispute between a photographer and an educational textbook publisher, the Plaintiff sough the production of a definition list to the Defendants’ database abbreviations.  Bean v. John Wiley & Sons, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 4900, 1-3 (D. Ariz. Jan. 17, 2012). The Defendants’ sales, printing and distribution database was[…]

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Arguing $2,630 is Undue Burden to Search ESI

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[…]

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Form of Production: (Almost) Anyway You Want It

A Plaintiff in an age discrimination case requested ESI be produced in native format.  Linnebur v. United Tel. Ass’n, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 88456 (D. Kan. Aug. 10, 2011). The Defendants did not assert any objections, but produced the responsive ESI as PDF’s.  Linnebur, at 3. The ESI at issue[…]

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Exotic Apples: Solutions in Collecting & Processing Apple ESI

My friend Charlie Kaupp at Digital Strata brought the following issue to me: There is an increasingly prevalent amount of Apple ESI found in corporate environments, especially among executives, engineering, and marketing groups. Most review platforms do not handle large portions of Apple ESI, including: Mac email (Entourage, Outlook 2011,[…]

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