A number of class action lawsuits have recently been filed by shareholders of Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG), alleging, among others, breaches of fiduciary duties. The allegations against the directors and management include issuing false and misleading information as well as insider trading of stock that took place between February and April of this year.
Plaintiffs allege that the directors and officers – while simulataneously making false and misleading statements regarding the business and its prospects – sold off over $167 million in stock during this two month period, where the stocks climbed 20 percent in price. The stock price peaked on the day the last insider sale was made, and fell dramatically thereafter.
The lawsuit will undoubtedly raise a number of electronic discovery issues, including the retention and preservation of electronic evidence and data. The directors and officers will likely have email chains and threads not only on computers owned by Chipotle, but on personal devices as well. Once electronic evidence is received, the plaintiff trial attorneys must search and organize the data to find the evidence necessary to prove their breach of fiduciary claims. However, doing so in the traditional method of linear review of documents and by performing keyword searches for relevant documents is not only time consuming but is wholly inefficient.
Applying analytics and programmatic approaches to the evaluation of defendant’s electronic data such as automated issue coding, plaintiffs can spend their time focusing on the 10 percent of the documents that are meaningful to the case, rather than getting bogged down in the 90 percent that will not matter. To learn more about ILS’s analytic and programmatic plaintiff electronic discovery services for class action lawsuits and multidistrict litigation, please call us at 888-313-4457.