New York Supreme Court Provides Detailed Discovery Protocol

The New York Supreme Court considered aspects of discovery of a hard drive for a recent marital dispute. In this opinion, the Court surpassed mere decision and instead, also outlined strict guidelines to be followed in connection to discovery of the hard drive.

On February 4, 2010, plaintiff Sarah Schreiber requested that a hard drive of [...]

Florida Court Orders Party to Pay for Discovery Error

In this case, the District Court considered Lexington Insurance Company’s motion for sanctions and reviewed the magistrate judge’s previous recommendation of dismissal sanctions and reimbursement costs. Bray & Gillespie Management, LLC, after it was discovered that it failed to produce records, claimed it was unaware of an automatic function of the business’s computerized account management [...]

Are E-Discovery Services Taxable?

In this IP case, Return Path Inc., et al. filed a motion to tax the costs related to using CBT Flint Partners, LLC to assist with the production of 1.4 million electronic documents and 6 versions of source code. CBT Flint Partners, LLC argued that fees associated with the collection of documents for production are [...]

Computer Infections: The Cure Can Kill

I must admit, I like the title that the editors at the National Law Journal came up with for Fabio Celeita’s and my article: “Computer infections are bad enough, but the cure can kill” (premium subscription required). Our article provides a basic overview of the threats to electronically-stored information, let alone to a legal team’s [...]

Failure to Dedupe: Unethical?

Anne Kershaw and Joe Howie write on the Law Technology News website about the results of their survey among eDiscovery providers.  The gist of their article – and it’s a good one – is that failure to deduplicate e-mails across custodians may be at best sloppy, and at worst unethical:

We asked several judges to review [...]

DE Chancery: Their Spoliation May Be Your Fault

From the National Law Journal, Sheri Qualters reports on the Delaware Court of Chancery’s recent spate of decisions regarding several aspects of e-discovery practice.  Most significant to me is Beard Research Inc. v. Kates, in which plaintiffs were granted an adverse inference instruction for missing computer evidence.  The key language:

If the parties do not focus [...]