Knotty Issues of eDiscovery
The idea of a litigation hold getting produced in a lawsuit is nightmare fuel for many attorneys. Nothing good will come from it. Luckily for the party in this case, the Court denied that motion to compel…without prejudice. In a punitive class action case over claims false advertising of nationwide[…]
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Determining the triggering date for the duty to preserve is one of the most litigated disputes in cases over lost electronically stored information. In a partnership dissolution cases, a meeting ended with the alleged remark, “so sue me” in mid-2014. The Defendants brought a motion for sanctions or adverse inference[…]
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The Plaintiffs were granted a TRO, and then a clarifying Preliminary Injunction order, for the Defendant to preserve electronically stored information in a case where a former employee went to a competitor with trade secret information. Henry Schein v. Cook (N.D.Cal. June 22, 2016, No. 16-cv-03166-JST) 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS[…]
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The duty to preserve is a tricky beast. Determining when a party “knew or should have known that litigation was imminent” is often a free fall into analyzing the facts of when a party had notice of a lawsuit. There are times when it is very obvious that a party[…]
Read moreA Pro Se Plaintiff in a prison inmate case requested the Court order the Defendants not to destroy any relevant video surveillance footage from a specific date. The Court declined, because the Defendant was already subject to the duty to preserve. Ross v. Conner, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 146887, at *17-18. The[…]
Read moreNo vacation should end with people becoming Plaintiffs. Sadly, that happened on a trip to Hawaii when someone had a slip and fall in a hotel garage after exiting an elevator. Riley v. Marriott Int’l, Inc., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 135728 (W.D.N.Y.Sept. 25, 2014). The Defendant hotel maintained both video[…]
Read moreA Plaintiff in a civil lawsuit deactivated her Facebook profile on the advice of her attorney after the duty to preserve triggered. The Plaintiff claimed she used the account to primarily communicate with her family. Chapman v. Hiland Operating, LLC, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 74248, 4-7 (D.N.D. May 29, 2014).[…]
Read moreA Defendant sought reconsideration of a Court order allowing discovery on their document retention policies and litigation hold strategy on the grounds 1) the order was premature and 2) it was irrelevant and not discoverable. Cactus Drilling Co. v. Nat’l Union Fire Ins. Co., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 45251, 11-14[…]
Read moreIt is not every day you see lawsuits about insurance policies from 1986 to 1987. Add Judge Paul Grimm’s powerhouse footnotes and you get a great lesson in document retention policies and litigation holds (plus a great footnote on the state of mind exception to hearsay for all the evidence[…]
Read moreIn an insurance dispute over coverage, a Plaintiff sought production of electronically stored information in native file AND TIFF format after the Defendant produced discovery in hard-copy format. The Defendant opposed re-producing in native file format and sought cost-shifting if required to produce natively. Mancino v Fingar Ins. Agency, 2014 N.Y.[…]
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