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Plaintiff Electronic Discovery in Patent Case: Disclosing the Source (Code)
In a case before the U.S. Court of Appeals to the Federal Circuit, the plaintiff held a patent dealing with weather reporting and forecasting. In Baron Services, Inc. v. Media Weather Innovations LLC, No. 11-CV-1606 (Fed. Cir. 2013), plaintiff Baron filed a patent-in-suit claim against defendant MWI, a company that
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Plaintiffs Sought Spoliation Sanction for Deleted Audio Recordings: Warranted or Not?
In the case Cottle-Banks v. Cox Communications, 2013 WL 2244333 (S.D.Cal 2013), a court considered an electronic discovery issue of whether spoliation sanctions were warranted against the defendant for the automatic destruction of audio recordings saved as electronic data. At issue in the underlying case, filed on September 13, 2010,
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Electronic Discovery Question: Does Predictive Coding Case Law Require Production of Seed Sets?
In an order dated May 21, 2013 in the case Hinterberger v. Catholic Health Systems, 08-CV-380S(F), the court heard arguments from the parties about whether predictive coding case law requires the early production of a “seed set” of documents. In this case, the parties started out sorting and culling electronic
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Judge in TriMet Bus Accident Case: “Discovery is Basically eDiscovery”
It was recently reported that a defendant in a federal court case involving a bus accident in Portland refused to produce email threads in response to discovery requests. The argument? The Oregonian reported that at the April 9, 2013 hearing on plaintiffs’ Motion to Compel, the attorney for the defendant,
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Court Compels Google to Disclose How it Created the Universe
This title is a paraphrase of the basic question at the heart of an Order dated May 9, 2013 in Apple v. Samsung, Case No. 12-CV-0630-LHK(PSG)(N.D.Ca. 2013), where Apple had a dispute with third-party Google. Apple subpoenaed Google to provide electronic discovery under Fed. R. Civ. P. 45. (Non-parties may
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Search Term Disputes: Valid Arguments or a Simple Lack of Cooperation?
Many times, search term disagreements can be resolved through cooperative efforts. Indeed, the “meet and confer” requirement of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mandates parties to make a good faith effort to resolve such disputes without litigation. In the March 14, 2013 order in the case Robert Bosch LLC
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Will Email Threads Uncover Fraud in an $18 Billion International Case?
As email threads are now critical evidence in most civil litigation, it should be no surprise that email might be the key to determining whether massive fraud is at play in a very interesting case out of the Southern District of New York. Chevron Corp. v. Steven Donzinger, et al.,
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District Court Chastises Defendant for Lack of eDiscovery Knowledge
Many lawyers now have a good understanding of electronic discovery law and technological advances, and the updated ABA model rules require this understanding to fulfill the ethical requirement of competence. For attorneys who lack this knowledge or who attempt to claim ignorance to evade discovery obligations should take note: courts
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Open Season on Facebook for Plaintiff ESI Production? Not So Fast.
There is a new trend emerging in civil litigation relating to plaintiff ESI production requests: defendants are now regularly demanding access to social media accounts, particularly Facebook. While the case law continues to evolve, many courts hold that defendants must make a “threshold showing” that information gleaned from a plaintiff’s
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Does the Duty to Preserve Include the Duty to Recover Electronic Data?
The case law is clear: once litigation is reasonably foreseeable, both parties in civil litigation have a duty to preserve electronic data that would be relevant to a claim or defense. If a party destroys evidence, even unintentionally, this could be construed as spoliation. The sanctions available after spoliation include