e-Lessons Learned

Yet again, defendants’ bad faith costs them dearly. In Swofford v. Eslinger, Robert Swofford brought a § 1983 claim and state law claims of battery, negligent training, and supervision against defendants William Morris and Ronald Remus, two Deputies for the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office (“SCSO”), and Donald Eslinger, the Sheriff of Seminole County, State of Florida. Swofford was shot seven times by the Deputies on his own property after being misidentified as a burglar, and spent six weeks in the hospital.

Swofford’s attorney sent two letters to SCSO requesting that all evidence related to the shooting be maintained in its original order. Upon receipt of the letters, SCSO never issued any directives or “litigation hold memos” to prevent the destruction of relevant evidence. The senior members of SCSO who saw the two letters from Swofford’s attorney did not communicate with any other employees of SCSO to maintain evidence relevant to Swofford’s case.

Continue reading »

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?

Continue reading »

Dead men tell no tales, but their bodies provide enough evidence to paint a graphic picture. The same is true of deleted files on a computer. Missing files can carry the inference that the evidence was only destroyed because it would have been damaging to the party responsible.

In Paris Business Products, Inc. v. Genisis Technologies, LLC (“Paris”), Genisis Technologies, LLC, (“Genisis”) was subject to a discovery order requiring it to preserve all relevant data on company-owned computer hard drives. Despite this order, Genisis’ executive officers allegedly were responsible for: (1) deleting the company hard drives by reformatting them; and (2) physically removing and destroying some hard drives. Continue reading »

In Einstein, plaintiffs claimed that a Brooklyn condominium unit that they purchased was defective in its design and construction, and that defendants, including a real estate broker and several of its agents, fraudulently concealed water leak defects and induced plaintiffs to purchase the apartment. The plaintiffs obtained emails from co-defendants that were transmitted by the business defendant’s employees but never produced by the defendants during discovery.

The defendants failed to take reasonable measures to ensure that all business communications were preserved as per the legal hold notice instructions, which ultimately lead to spoliation of the documents and sanctions for acting grossly negligent. Through various motions and testimony of one the defendant’s IT director, it became clear that defendants relied on backup tapes in order to retrieve documents which were at issue, the reliance on which was flawed from the start. Continue reading »

Can a defendant be subject to discovery sanctions for conduct occurring before discovery even begins? Although this may seem antithetical, correctional officers at a federal prison in New Jersey were sanctioned for spoliating evidence when they were unable to produce videotape footage of an incident involving a prisoner during discovery of the Section 1983 action arising out of the incident.

In Kounellis v. Sherrer, 529 F.Supp. 2d 503 (D.N.J. 2008), plaintiff prisoner brought a Section 1983 action against correctional officers and prison officials after the officers allegedly assaulted the prisoner in retaliation for his filing of administrative complaints against the officers. After the alleged assault, the prisoner repeatedly requested a copy of the video surveillance footage from a camera in the area of the alleged assault. Defendants never provided the prisoner with the copy. Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

Trouble lurks when you rely on ‘a pure heart and an empty head’

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. “Revisit Zubulake!? But that was so long ago! Surely everything has changed!” (Sarcasm)

To be fair, things were quite different back then – no iPhones, no clouds (in the IT world), no Google Any-Application-You-Can-Think-Ofs. The technology landscape has certainly evolved since Zubulake became a household name.

But (at least) two things haven’t changed: Judge Shira A. Scheindlin’s view of eDiscovery due diligence and parties’ (and their lawyers’) continued failure to meet these expectations.

Continue reading »

Tech-savvy business owner Dmitri Nikitin received a judicial tongue-lashing and an adverse inference instruction after he destroyed emails potentially relevant to a pending lawsuit brought by a Korean corporation. Not buying Nikitin’s “hackers” defense, the Court said that Plaintiff Optowave was entitled to an adverse jury instruction at trial against Nikitin’s company Precision Technology Group. “This sanction,” the Judge wrote, “will serve to cure the unacceptable actions of Nikitin, while allowing the case to be decided on the merits.”

Continue reading »

Ever since the Enron destruction of documents debacle, one would think that corporate executives would realize that destroying evidence probably isn’t the greatest idea. Nonetheless, they seem to keep on shredding and pressing delete as if there were no tomorrow.

In Smith v. Slifer, one of the defendant entity’s executives, after being served with notice of the lawsuit, allegedly took it upon himself to download and use a program called Anti Tracks in order to wipe clean his home personal computer of allegedly damaging evididence. I emphasize the word “allegedly” because the Anti Tracks program was apparently pretty effective, rendering it impossible for plaintiff’s experts to garner any concrete evidence that relevant evidence was in fact destroyed (although they were easily able to establish that several documents were deleted). Continue reading »

Imagine you are an executive of a computer company that keeps experiencing defects in what is known as a floppy disk controller (FDC), a part in most personal computers. You decide that a technology needs to be developed to detect and resolve these defects. But someone else has already developed similar technology. However, even more alarming is that the computer company has a limited information management and data retention policy.

Dr. Philip Adams found himself in this precarious situation when he brought a patent infringement action against ASUSTEK Computer, Inc. and ASUS Computer International (collectively hereinafter “ASUS”) alleging spoliation of relevant evidence. Adams claimed that ASUS should be sanctioned due to the spoliation claims.

Continue reading »