E-DiSCOVERY

On June 14, 2016, the Rhode Island District Court applied the newly amended FRCP to ensure proportional discovery and limit Parties’ discovery motions. In this intellectual property action, the Court had to determine when the fact discovery phase should end and what discovery had to be completed before it did. In particular, Defendant sought to compel discovery of ESI in its native format with metadata. The litigation was carried out over three and one-half years. The court extended the close Read more [...]

On July 12, 2016, a US Delaware District Court imposed $3,000,000 punitive sanction on Defendant due to its “high degree of fault, its bad-faith intent to deprive GN of responsive documents, and the prejudice it has caused to GN's case — along with the difficulties it has created for GN in "getting to the bottom of the deletion story" and its (at times) unwillingness to acknowledge wrongdoing”. In light of the evidence brought before the Court, including Plantronics’ “obfuscation and Read more [...]

In this insurance case, Defendant State Farm Fire and Casualty Company, objected to the Special Master’s discovery order compelling the answer to a set of interrogatories on ground of burdensomeness. The Western District of Missouri denied the motion to vacate. Labrier v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co ., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 61246 (W.D. Mo. May 9, 2016) Plaintiff had requested remote access to State Farm’s electronic claims system but State Farm objected that that “the identity of data Read more [...]

  On January 13, 2016, the District of Connecticut declined to compel production of all ESI documents resulting from agreed search terms. Here the parties’ counsel had agreed to a list of search terms which resulted in approximately 38,000 documents but Defendant did not produce them all, produced only 2,214 pages. Plaintiff objected that Defendant was omitting “highly relevant” material and that they had agreed on search terms “to avoid prolonged and detailed debate over Read more [...]