January 25, 2009
Citation: Digicel Limited v. Cable & Wireless Plc, 2008 EWHC 2522 (Ch)
Digicel Limited v. Cable & Wireless Plc, 2008 WL 4698881
e-Lesson Learned:
1) A disclosing party cannot claim that an additional search will produce only duplicate documents. If a class of documents was excluded from an initial search, a party cannot claim a defense that the documents are merely duplicates of the documents already produced. The search will be required if the initial search was unreasonable.
2) A disclosing party should not conduct a keyword search unilaterally without first conferring with the opposing party. The court will determine what a reasonable search is, and if the search is unreasonable, an additional search will be required. Conferring with the other party beforehand to determine their intended scope will limit the possibility that an additional search will be required at an additional cost.
This case originated from a dispute during an attempt to deregulate the telecommunications industry in the Caribbean. The claimants are mobile phone companies in the Carribean who sought to connect to interconnect their phone lines to the existing landline provider’s pursuant to the newly issued licenses. The defendants are the incumbent landline telephone providers who relinquished their exclusive telecommunications licenses in agreements with the relevant governments. The claimants argued that the defendants intentionally delayed in granting the interconnections so as to benefit financially and competitively. The claimants also argued that this deliberate and unlawful delay was part of a conspiracy between all or at least some of the defendants. The defendants argue that these claims are unsupported and baseless.
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Tagged as: Accessibility, Cost Sharing & Shifting, Discoverability, Meet & Confer, Procedure, Production of Data
View more articles implicating: Miscellaneous
January 23, 2009
Citation: Qualcomm, Inc. v. Broadcom Corp., No. 05-CV-1958-B, 2008 WL 66932 (S.D. Cal. Jan. 7, 2008)
Employee/Employer Implicated: Everyone, from management to individual employees to in-house counsel to independent contractors
e-Lesson Learned: During discovery, make sure you and your employees give attorneys complete access to company email records, guiding them towards the accounts of relevant employees and offering helpful search terms that relate to the matter at hand.
Let’s say you download an e-book of Aesop’s Fables to look for the story “The Milkmaid and Her Pail.” You think of search terms and come up with: milkmaid, pail, count, chickens, hatched. Then what? If you want to find the story, you do the search. However, if you’re pretty sure the story is there but you don’t really want to find it, you might search other terms. Well, as Qualcomm found out, the second option doesn’t work so well when it comes to discovery.
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Tagged as: Accessibility, Computer Forensics Protocols, Discoverability, Good Faith, Production of Data
View more articles implicating: Employees, Experts/Independent Contractors, Owners/Executives, Upper Management
