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Scope of Discovery (Continued)

Washington v. Thurgood Marshall Academy, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 26798 (D.D.C. October 31, 2005).
Defendant was not compelled to produce email messages in addition to the ones they had already produced based solely on plaintiff's belief that additional email existed.

Muse v. Bravo Sports, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13928 (S.D. Iowa July 12, 2005).
The California company moved to dismiss the Iowa lawsuit citing lack of jurisdiction, however, the court deferred ruling until jurisdictional discovery was complete to identify the extent with which the company used its website to do business in Iowa.

Papyrus Technology Corp. v. New York Stock Exchange, Inc., 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13659 (S.D.N.Y. July 7, 2005).
The federal magistrate judge denied plaintiff's request for discovery of computer files, as five months had passed since discovery had closed and the judge believed that plaintiff's claim that it had only recently learned of files was "disingenuous". The judge also believed that plaintiff was attempting to expand the litigation's issues as the demand occurred a few weeks after the depositions of experts.

Union Bank of California v. The Superior Court of Alameda County, 2005 Cal. App. LEXIS 977 (Cal. Ct. App., 1st App. D. June 17, 2005).
Suspicious activity privilege held to apply to investigative bank communications.

Bd. of Managers of the Atrium Condo. v. W. 79th Street Corp., 2005 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 3439 (N.Y. App. Div. Apr. 5, 2005).
Defendant requested electronic discovery from plaintiff's attorneys' computers, which was denied as academic.

TIG Insurance Company v. Premier Parks, 2005 Del. Super. LEXIS 60 (Del. March 1, 2005).
The court limited the amount of discovery to be produced due to substantial burdens associated with searching plaintiff's computer files.

Williams v. Mass. Mut. Life Ins. Co., 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1555 (D. Mass. Feb. 2, 2005).
Plaintiff moved for the court to appoint a neutral expert to search the defendant's computer system, which the court denied.

Compuware Corp. v. Moody's Investors, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 25309, (E.D. Mich. December 16, 2004).
The court denied a request to enforce a discovery order and narrow the amount of data to be produced.

Laurin v. Pokoik, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24010 (S.D.N.Y. November 30, 2004).
The court determined that the company did not have to produce a computer entry made by a former employee.

Pamlab, L.L.C. v. Rite Aid Corporation, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 20693 (E.D. La. October 13, 2004).
Data that could be easily retrieved from a computer system was ordered to be produced by defendant, however a sampling process would be used regarding information that would have to be produced manually.

Fraser v. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 24856 (3d Cir. December 10, 2003).
The court found that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was not violated by defendant's search of plaintiff's emails stored on defendant's computer system.

Physicians Interactive v. Lathian Systems, 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 22868 (E.D. Va. December 5, 2003).
The plaintiff was entitled to limited expedited discovery, with the assistance of a computer forensics expert, based on the web hosting company's assertion that an employee of the defendant hacked into plaintiff's website.

Bethea v. Civ. Action Comcast, 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21595 (D. D.C. Dec. 3, 2003).
In this employment discrimination case, plaintiff moved to compel access to defendant's computer systems due to their suspicion that defendant had not produced all documents relevant to plaintiff's discovery requests. Defendant argued that plaintiff had shown no evidence that additional relevant information was contained on their computer systems or that defendant had not complied with discovery requests. The court denied plaintiff's motion based on plaintiff's failure to provide evidence that additional relevant information may be stored on defendant's computer systems.

Farmers Insur. Co. v. Peterson, 2003 OK 99; 81 P.3d 659 (Nov. 25, 2003).
District court orders insurer Farmers Insurance to analyze three years of claim files and identify those that pertained to complaints from Oklahoma insureds on med-pay claims. Insurer filed for extraordinary relief and sought to prohibit enforcement of the district court's order as it would require insurer to devote 30 employees to manually analyze 600,000 closed files over an approximated time period of 2 months. Based on this undue burden, the Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned the district court's discovery order compelling the insurer to perform this search.

In re Honeywell Int'l, Inc. Securities Litigation, 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 20602 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 18, 2003).
A third party was ordered to re-produce relevant documents in electronic form after they had already provided them in hard copy form as it was determined that the documents were stored in electronic form through the normal course of business. The court denied a request for email and other electronic documents based on the fact that the request was overly broad.

In re Ford Motor Company, 003 U.S. App. LEXIS 19531 (Sept. 22, 2003).
The appellate court vacated the discovery order that permitted plaintiff to directly access defendant's computer databases, as it could not be determined that defendant had not complied with discovery.

Wright v. AmSouth Bancorporation, 320 F.3d 1198, 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 2016, 16 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. C 275, 91 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 41 (11th Cir. Ala. Feb. 5, 2003).
It was determined that the district court did not abuse its discretion by denying a motion to compel production of electronic documents based on the initial overly broad request.

Dodge, Warren, & Peters Ins. Servs. v. Riley, 2003 WL 245586 (Cal. Ct. App. Feb 5, 2003).
Defendants copied and removed excessive amounts of electronic information from plaintiff's files and storage media prior to their termination. Alleging misappropriation of trade secrets, unfair business practices, breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract, plaintiff sued defendants. The trial court issued a preliminary injunction against defendants, ordering them to preserve electronic evidence and appointing an expert to recover lost or deleted files, copy data, and perform key word searches. Upon the defendants' appeal, the appellate court upheld the trial court's order.

Ex parte Wal-Mart, Inc., 809 So. 2d 818, 2001 Ala. LEXIS 283 (Ala. July 13, 2001).
In this personal injury case, defendant appealed an order to provide plaintiff with customer incident reports and employee accident review forms stored in an electronic database controlled by a wholly owned subsidiary of defendant. The appellate court found that producing these records would not be unduly burdensome or costly as they were stored in a computer-searchable format, however, it also found that the trial court had ordered additional discovery beyond plaintiff's request. The appellate court held that the discovery order should have been restricted to incidents involving falling-merchandise, as was the issue in this case, with the trial court also setting geographic and temporal limits.

Hayes v. Compass Group USA, Inc., 202 F.R.D. 363, 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14313 (D. Conn. May 9, 2001).
In this age discrimination action, plaintiff requested defendant provide information regarding all similar claims previously filed against defendant. Defendant declared that searching for claims filed before 1998 would be unduly burdensome and expensive as they were stored in a general computer under the claimant's name and were not sorted by subject. The court ordered defendant to produce only claims filed after January 1, 1998 and defendant was not required to manually search for claims filed before that time.

Superior Consultant Co. v. Bailey, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13051 (E.D. Mich.).
In this case alleging misappropriation of trade secrets, plaintiff moved for a preliminary injunction against defendant after defendant was found to be working for a competitor. The court fashioned an order that halted defendant from soliciting plaintiff's employees or revealing confidential information, while also ordering defendant to produce a backup copy of defendant's laptop computer system and any other personal computer system that defendant may have used.

Alexander v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 188 F.R.D. 111 (D.D.C. 1998).
The court found that an inspection of an employee's computer hard drive and server was warranted to conclude whether additional responsive documents existed that had not already been produced. The court also found that it was not necessary to require defendant to restore deleted files and email messages where plaintiff did not provide "appropriately worded searches for limited number of individuals."

 

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