Employee/Employer Implicated: Multinational businesses with affiliates and/or subsidiaries in Europe, Data controllers
e-Lesson Learned: Recently adopted guidelines clarify the result that occurs when an EU country’s e-discovery rules are at odds with American courts’ requirements.
E-discovery is a constantly developing topic in the legal world, and the word, “world,” should be taken literally. Across the globe, different nations and their legal system are formulating new rules to tackle new discovery issues that can arise almost as quickly as new technology and means of communication can develop. The only problem with this, however, is that different nations are addressing their e-discovery issues with different solutions. This problem usually rears its ugly head when one of the parties in a lawsuit is a multinational company. What is a British company supposed to do when it’s sued in an American because of a foul-up by its French Subsidiary? Do they supply all of the e-discovery materials required by American courts? What if e-discovery that the American court requires no longer exists because it never needed to be stored in the first place by French or British?
Citation: Newman v. Borders, Inc., 257 F.R.D. 1 (D.D.C. 2009).
Employee/Employer Implicated: Large Bookstore, Outside Counsel
e-Lesson Learned: Rule 30(b)(6) requests must specify whether electronically stored information retention policies will be within the scope of the deposition testimony sought.
In Newman v. Borders, Inc., the United States District Court for the District of Columbia held that because plaintiff failed to notify defendant in a deposition notice that questions in a deposition would pertain to the defendant book’s email policies (or any electronically stored information (ESI) in general), plaintiff was not entitled to take further depositions despite the designated witness’s lack of knowledge regarding that subject matter. However, the Court further held that due to both parties’ failures to try hard enough to resolve the dispute and because discovery regarding document retention policies is a legitimate request, defendant was nonetheless ordered to answer specific questions posed by the Court regarding its email retention policies.
The lesson here is twofold: If you are going to depose witnesses regarding ESI, you must put the other party on notice of the scope of the deposition testimony being sought, or risk losing the opportunity to conduct further depositions. But regardless of whether you are the party who asks or the party who answers, you must be sure to make every reasonable effort to resolve discovery disputes. Continue reading »
e-Lesson Learned: If your client is under an agreement to produce specific custodians’ documents by a specific deadline, make sure you know all physical locations each custodian might save documents, INCLUDING a shared file directory on a server. The court will not be impressed by your attempts to use, in support of your motions, documents produced late; and the excuse that you were unaware of a shared directory of a named custodian is no excuse for failing to produce responsive documents found on that directory.
It happens all the time. To expedite the litigation process, parties reach agreements as to the scope and timing of electronic discovery. After all, who wants to delay litigation with the lengthy and expensive review of a universe of documents when you can significantly shrink that universe without compromising the quality of your production by agreeing on a set of specific custodians?
The parties in Wixon v. Wyndham Resort Development Corp. reached an agreement that by a specific date, Wyndham would produce electronically stored information (“ESI”) held by specific custodians that matched specific search terms. But what happened when, after the deadline, Wyndham revealed a stash of ESI found in a shared directory of a hard drive not allocated to a specific custodian? Does a document not directly linked to a specific custodian automatically become “nonresponsive”? Continue reading »
Just because e-discovery is involved does not mean we can disregard the rules applied to traditional discovery. While we must adapt the way we approach discovery because of advancing technology and the decline of the paper-based world, we must not forget that the spirit behind the rules of discovery apply to all discovery, including e-discovery.
In High Voltage, the plaintiff filed a motion to compel the defendant to search for alternative sources beyond the initial production of documents for the selection of the VAULT mark. This would involve having the defendant review an additional 1.5 million pages of documents (17 gigabytes) beyond the 1.7 million pages already produced to the plaintiff. Continue reading »
e-Lesson Learned: Attorney-client communications made via personal, password-protected web-based email accounts are still privileged, even if accessed via a company-supplied computer – at least in New Jersey!
The New Jersey Supreme Court has a long history of affording New Jersey citizens broader privacy protection rights than those offered by the federal government. For example, the New Jersey Supreme Court has held that citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their bank account records, in their garbage, and in the personal information linked to their IP addresses. Thus, when the question of whether an employee who uses a company computer to access e-mail communications between her and her attorney maintains the confidentiality of those communications, it was no surprise that the Court held that the act of an employee who accesses her attorney-client communications via a company laptop does not destroy the privilege.
e-Lesson Learned: When the court orders your client to preserve data, don’t let employees wipe their BlackBerrys® before turning them in. A wiped BlackBerry® smartphone could translate into “bad faith” and might just induce a court to impose spoliation sanctions.
Suddenly find yourself at the wrong end of a trade secrets litigation? Heed this advice: When the court says “preserve,” that means documents, files, data, and BlackBerry® smartphones. Thus, be sure to instruct your clients not to wipe the memory from their BlackBerrys or other handheld devices before turning them in; or else, your client may be subject to sanctions.
The defendants in a trade secrets theft case learned this lesson the hard way when the District Court in Florida slapped them with sanctions after they turned in freshly “wiped” BlackBerrys. The court interpreted the freshly sanitized BlackBerrys as evidence of bad faith that justified sanctions. But you might be thinking: “A BlackBerry wiped clean?Who cares! All the e-mails the other side could possibly want are readily available on the server.” This type of thinking could get you in trouble. Let’s see why.
Citation: Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc., Docket No. BER-L-858-08 (slip opinion) (N.J. Super. Ct. L. Div. Feb. 5, 2009)
Employee/Employer Implicated: Employees and Employers Alike
e-Lesson Learned: (Coming as soon as the Supremes rule on the issue of whether this employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy in emails between the employee and her lawyer, sent and received (during work hours) using the employer’s computer and IT systems
Citation: William A. Gross Constr. Assocs., Inc. v. American Mfrs. Mut. Ins. Co., 256 F.R.D. 134 (S.D.N.Y. 2009)
Employee/Employer Implicated: Counsel, Third Parties, Document Custodians
e-Lesson Learned: When it comes to conducting searches of email and electronically stored information, New York District Courts expect counsel to cooperate and, with the input of document custodians, carefully develop keywords, which should then be quality control tested to assure accuracy and eliminate false positives.
Although most professionals and courts are still behind in the times when it comes to electronically stored information (ESI) and its discovery, the Southern District of New York recently sent a clear warning: Get with it! This district court cautions that counsel must cooperate with each other and get input from document custodians, to carefully develop and test keywords used to search email and other ESI.
In this March 2009 case stemming from a multi-million dollar construction dispute, the project owner agreed to produce all project-related emails and ESI from its non-party construction manager. The issue before the Court concerned the production of the construction manager’s emails from its server, and how to separate unrelated emails from project-related emails.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, more shame on you. Fool me three times and you are in some hot water! Regardless of whether you are (or represent) the plaintiff or the defendant, your discovery obligations are the same: Absent a valid, court-sanctioned objection, you must comply with your adversary’s discovery demands.
While electronically stored information (ESI) may be a rather esoteric concept for many of us (perhaps most), in the eyes of the law and the court, ESI is just as real as traditional paper documents; and one’s failure to search for and disclose ESI in a timely manner could lead to big problems for an attorney and the client. In one case, it may have cost one company $25 million.
Citation: Proctor & Gamle Co. v. S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 2009 WL 440543 (E.D. Tex. Feb 19, 2009).
Employee/Employer Implicated: In-House Counsel
e-Lesson Learned: If you want to shift the cost burden of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to an opposing party, you’d better back up your request with some legitimate facts.
In this recent opinion, one Texas Court applied the Zubulake cost-shifting factors to a shampoo company’s unsupported argument that the opposing party should have to share the costs of performing OCR… and booted their argument to the curb.
At the pre-trial Case Management Conference, the Court ordered the parties to submit estimates of the costs involved in the production of documents in searchable Tagged Image File Format (“TIFF”) with Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”) before it made a ruling on the format of electronic discovery. Continue reading »
e-Lessons Learned is fast becoming the site of choice for employers, employees, judges, lawyers, and journalists who are interested in learning more about these areas without being intimidated by the complexity of the topic.In fact, organizations and event coordinators often feature e-Lessons Learned as their official e-discovery blog.To register e-Lessons Learned as the official blog of your organization or event, click here.
“The blog takes a clever approach to [e-discovery]. Each post discusses an e-discovery case that involves an e-discovery mishap, generally by a company employee. It discusses the conduct that constituted the mishap and then offers its ‘e-lesson’ — a suggestion on how to learn from the mistake and avoid it happening to you.”
-- Robert Ambrogi, Legal Tech Blogger and creator of LawSites
"Although I may have missed some, yours is the first article that I have seen addressing Zubulake II. It is often the lost opinion amongst the others."
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Tagged as: Chain of Custody, Computer Forensics Protocols, Discoverability, Good Faith, Spoliation
