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Government Document Productions Can Be Like Water Torture – eDiscovery Case Law

In Botell v. United States, 2012 U.S. Dist. (E.D. Cal. Sept. 18, 2012), Magistrate Judge Gregory Hollows noted that the US Government’s “document production performance in these proceedings has been akin to a drop-by-drop water torture” and ordered a preclusion order prohibiting the US Government “from presenting evidence in its case that had been requested by plaintiffs in the Requests for Production, but which has not been produced” as of the date of the order.  The US was also still required to produce the documents, whether they planned to use them or not.  Judge Hollows also noted that the “Plaintiff has not waived any motion to seek further sanctions regarding non-production of documents, or spoliation of documents.”

In this wrongful death and personal injury action at Lassen Volcanic National Park when a mortared rock wall gave way killing one child and injuring another, the US Government produced over 7,000 pages of documents, yet, it was noted that “there is a glaring lack of production of emails from defendant’s agents and employees” with emails having only been produced from one custodian.  As five other custodians were referenced in the produced emails, the plaintiffs contended that emails should have been produced from them as well.  With regard to the back up of emails, one of the defendant declarations described the backup policy as follows: “[b]ack-up emails are retained for 30 days only, unless they are subject to a litigation hold notice or pertain to the BP Gulf Oil spill.”

Judge Hollows ordered the defendants to provide a declaration describing “searches conducted to locate physical and electronic copies of emails” responsive to production requests, noting the declaration “shall state the steps taken to locate these emails, whether any such emails exist, and if not, a definitive statement that they no longer exist. If further responsive documents are located, they shall be produced at the time declarations are filed.”

Summarizing the production issue in his order, Judge Hollows noted as follows:

“At this juncture, the United States has purportedly been looking for documents for months, yet the undersigned, to the date of the hearing, does not have confidence that an organized, thorough search has been performed. Rather, defendant’s document production performance in these proceedings has been akin to a drop-by-drop water torture. At some point, plaintiff must be protected from the United States’ further belated production of pertinent documents.”

As a result, Judge Hollows issued the preclusion order, with the possibility of more sanctions to come.

So, what do you think?  Was the ruling harsh enough?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Are You Requesting the Best Production Format for Your Case? – eDiscovery Best Practices

One of the blogs I read regularly is Ball in your Court from Craig Ball, a previous thought leader interviewee on this blog.  His post from last Tuesday, Are They Trying to Screw Me?, is one that all attorneys that request ESI productions should read.

Ball describes a fairly typical proposed production format, as follows:

“Documents will be produced as single page TIFF files with multi-page extracted text or OCR.  We will furnish delimited IPRO or Opticon load files and will later identify fielded information we plan to exchange.”

Then, he asks the question: “Are they trying to screw you?”  Answer: “Probably not.”  But, “Are you screwing yourself by accepting the proposed form of production?  Yes, probably.”

With regard to producing TIFF files, Ball notes that “Converting a native document to TIFF images is lobotomizing the document.”  The TIFF image is devoid of any of the metadata that provides valuable information about the way in which the document was used, making analysis of the produced documents a much more difficult effort.  Ball sums up TIFF productions by saying “Think of a TIFF as a PDF’s retarded little brother.  I mean no offense by that, but TIFFs are not just differently abled; they are severely handicapped.  Not born that way, but lamed and maimed on purpose.  The other side downgrades what they give you, making it harder to use and stripping it of potentially-probative content.”

Opposing counsel isn’t trying to screw you with a TIFF production.  They just do it because they always provide it that way.  And, you accept it that way because you’ve always accepted it that way.  Ball notes that “You may accept the screwed up proposal because, even if the data is less useful and incomplete, you won’t have to evolve.  You’ll pull the TIFF images into your browser and painstakingly read them one-by-one, just like good ol’ paper; all-the-while telling yourself that what you didn’t get probably wasn’t that important and promising yourself that next time, you’ll hold out for the good stuff—the native stuff.”

We recently ran a blog series called First Pass Review – Of Your Opponent’s Data.  In that series, we discussed how useful that Early Data Assessment/FirstPass Review applications can be in reviewing your opponent’s produced ESI.  At CloudNine Discovery, we use FirstPass®, powered by Venio FPR™ for first pass review – it provides a number of mechanisms that are useful in analyzing your opponent’s produced data.  Capabilities like email analytics and message thread analysis (where missing emails in threads can be identified), synonym searching, fuzzy searching and domain categorization are quite useful in developing an understanding of your opponents production.  However, these mechanisms are only as useful as the data they’re analyzing.  Email analytics, message thread analysis and domain categorization are driven by metadata, so they are useless on TIFF/OCR/data productions.  You can’t analyze what you don’t have.

It’s time to evolve.  To get the most information out of your opponent’s production, you need to request the production in native format.  Opponents are probably not trying to screw you by producing in TIFF format, but you are screwing yourself if you decide to accept it in that format.

So, what do you think?  Do you request native productions from your opponents?  If not, why not?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Proximity Searches Can Be the Right Balance of Recall and Precision – eDiscovery Best Practices
 

When performing keyword searching, the challenge to performing those searches effectively is to balance recall (retrieving responsive documents with hits) and precision (not retrieving too many non-responsive documents with hits).  A search that has 100% precision will contain only responsive documents; however, that does not mean that all of the responsive documents have been retrieved.  A search that has 100% recall will contain all of the responsive documents in the collection; however, it may also contain a large number of non-responsive documents, which can be drive up review costs.  So, how to perform searches that effectively balance recall and precision?

One way is through proximity searching.  Proximity searching is simply looking for two or more words that appear close to each other in the document.  It’s more precise than an AND search (i.e., termA and termB) with more recall than a phrase search (i.e., “termA termB”).  Let’s look an example.

You’re working for an oil company and you’re looking for documents related to “oil rights” (such as “oil rights”, “oil drilling rights”, “oil production rights”, etc.).  You could perform phrase searches, but any variations that you didn’t think of would be missed (e.g., “rights to drill for oil”, etc.).  You could perform an AND search (i.e., “oil” AND “rights”), and that could very well retrieve all of the files related to “oil rights”, but it would also retrieve a lot of files where “oil” and “rights” appear, but have nothing to do with each other.  A search for “oil” AND “rights” throughout various oil company’s data stores may retrieve several published and copyrighted documents that mention the word “oil”, but have nothing to do with “oil rights”.  Why?  Because almost every published and copyrighted document will have the phrase “All Rights Reserved” in the document, so those will be retrieved, even though many of them will likely be non-responsive.

A proximity search like “oil within 5 words of rights” will only retrieve the document if those words are as close as specified to each other, in either order.  Proximity searching helps reduce the result set to a more manageable number for review, by eliminating all of the files that happen to mention “oil” and “rights” somewhere in the document, but not in context with each other.  Yet, it catches all of the variations of phrases containing “oil” and “rights” for which you may not think to search.

Proximity searches are great for searching people’s names, as well.  For example, a phrase search for “John Adams” won’t retrieve “Adams, John”, but a proximity search for “John within 3 words of Adams” will retrieve “John Adams”, “Adams, John”, and even “John Q. Adams”.

When developing a search of two or more related words that effectively balances recall and precision, consider using a proximity search.  It just might be the right search for the situation.

So, what do you think?  Do you use proximity searching to make your searches more effective?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Twitter Turns Over Tweets in People v. Harris – eDiscovery Case Law

As reported by Reuters, Twitter has turned over Tweets and Twitter account user information for Malcolm Harris in People v. Harris, after their motion for a stay of enforcement was denied by the Appellate Division, First Department in New York and they faced a finding of contempt for not turning over the information.  Twitter surrendered an “inch-high stack of paper inside a mailing envelope” to Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino, which will remain under seal while a request for a stay by Harris is heard in a higher court.

Back in April, Harris, an Occupy Wall Street activist facing criminal charges, tried to quash a subpoena seeking production of his Tweets and his Twitter account user information in his New York criminal case.  That request was rejected, so Twitter then sought to quash the subpoena themselves, claiming that the order to produce the information imposed an “undue burden” on Twitter and even forced it to “violate federal law”.

Then, on June 30, Judge Sciarrino ruled that Twitter must produce tweets and user information of Harris, noting: “If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is no proprietary interest in your tweets, which you have now gifted to the world. This is not the same as a private email, a private direct message, a private chat, or any of the other readily available ways to have a private conversation via the internet that now exist…Those private dialogues would require a warrant based on probable cause in order to access the relevant information.”  Judge Sciarrino indicated that his decision was “partially based on Twitter’s then terms of service agreement”, which was subsequently modified to add the statement “You Retain Your Right To Any Content You Submit, Post Or Display On Or Through The Service.”

Twitter filed an appeal of the trial court’s decision in with the Appellate Division, First Department in New York, but, unfortunately for Twitter, it didn’t take long for the appellate court panel to rule, as they denied Twitter’s motion for a stay of enforcement of the Trial Court’s order to produce Malcolm Harris’s tweets.  Twitter was ultimately given a deadline by the Trial Court during a hearing on the District Attorney’s motion (for Twitter to show cause as to why they should not be held in contempt for failure to produce the tweets) to produce Harris’s information by Friday September 14 or face a finding of contempt. Judge Sciarrino even went so far as to warn Twitter that he would review their most recent quarterly financial statements in determining the appropriate financial penalty if Twitter did not obey the order.  Now they have, though the information has been kept under seal (at least for now).

As the Reuters article notes, “The case has drawn interest from privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which have filed an amicus brief in support of Twitter’s appeal.  They are concerned the ruling could set a precedent putting the onus on social media companies to try to protect their users from criminal prosecution.”

So, what do you think?  Will the stay be denied or will the information remain under seal?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Don’t Be “Duped”, Files with Different HASH Values Can Still Be the Same – eDiscovery Best Practices

A couple of months ago, we published a post discussing how the number of pages in each gigabyte can vary widely and, to help illustrate the concept, we took one of our blog posts and put it into several different file formats to illustrate how each file had the same content, yet was a different size.  That’s not the only concept that example illustrates.

Content is Often Republished

How many of you have ever printed or saved a file to Adobe Acrobat PDF format?  Personally, I do it all the time.  For example, I “publish” marketing slicks created in Microsoft® Publisher, “publish” finalized client proposals created in Microsoft Word and “publish” presentations created in Microsoft PowerPoint to PDF format regularly.  Microsoft now even includes Adobe PDF as one of the standard file formats to which you can save a file, I even have a free PDF print driver on my laptop, so I can conceivably create a PDF file for just about anything that I can print.  In each case, I’m duplicating the content of the file, but in a different file format designed for publishing that content.

Another way content is republished is via the ubiquitous “copy and paste” capability that is used by so many to duplicate content to another file.  Whether copying part or all of the content, “copy and paste” functionality is essentially available in just about every application to be able to duplicate content from one application to the next or even one file to the next in the same application.

Same Content, Different HASH

When publishing a file to PDF or copying the entire contents of a file to a new file, the contents of the file may be the same, but the HASH value, which is a digital fingerprint that reflects the contents and format of the file, will be different.  So, a Word file and the PDF file published from the Word file may contain the same content, but the HASH value will be different.  Even copying the content from one file to another in the same software program can result in different HASH values, or even different file sizes.  For example, I copied the entire contents of yesterday’s blog post, written in Word, into a brand new Word file.  Not only did they have different HASH values, but they were different sizes – the copied file was 8K smaller than the original.  So, these files, while identical in content, won’t be considered “duplicates” based on HASH value and won’t be “de-duped” out of the collection as a result.  As a result, these files are considered “near-dupes” for analysis purposes, even though the content is essentially identical.

What to Do with the Near-Dupes?

Identifying and culling these essentially identical near-dupes isn’t necessary in every case, but if it is, you’ll need to perform a process that groups similar documents together so that those near-dupes can be identified and addressed.  We call that “clustering”.  For more on the benefits of clustering, check out this blog post.

So, what do you think?  What do you do with “dupes” that have different HASH values?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Proper Wildcard Searching: Why You Should Give a Dam* – eDiscovery Best Practices
 

When we launched eDiscoveryDaily over two years ago, I relayed a story where I provided search strategy assistance to a client that had already agreed upon several searches with opposing counsel.  One search related to mining activities, so the attorney decided to use a wildcard of “min*” to retrieve variations like “mine”, “mines” and “mining”.  That one search retrieved over 300,000 files with hits.

Why?  Because there are 269 words in the English language that begin with the letters “min”.  Words like “mind”, “mingle”, “minimal”, “miniscule” and “minutia” were all being retrieved in this search for files related to “mining”.  We ultimately had to go back to opposing counsel and negotiate a revised search that was more appropriate.

Recently, I encountered another client, who was trying to use “dam*” to retrieve variations of “damage” and “damages”.  Unfortunately, they also retrieved “dame”, “damp” and, well, “damn”.  There are 86 total words in the English language that begin with the letters “dam”.  Darn it!

Methods to Retrieve the Correct Wildcard Variations

In that blog post, I talked about the benefits of stem searching (if your application’s search engine supports stem searches) to capture the specific variations of a word (like “mine” or “damage”) and Morewords.com, which shows list of words that begin with your search string.  For example, to get all 269 words beginning with “min”, go here.  Substitute any characters for “min” in the URL to see the words that start with those characters.  Choose the variations you want and incorporate them into the search instead of the wildcard – i.e., use “(mine or “mines or mining)” instead of “min*” to retrieve a more precise result set without sacrificing recall.  Personally, I almost never use wildcards – I prefer to identify the variations and just use them, it’s more precise.

Introducing Spelling Variations into the Mix

The above approaches assume that words are spelled correctly in the collection – if they are not, those misspellings won’t be retrieved.  Misspellings can include Optical Character Recognition (OCR) errors, where the OCR application fails to render all words read from an image file with 100% accuracy (this is common, especially when the resolution of the image is less than optimal).  So, you can get “words” in the collection such as “min1ng” or “MININ6”.

To combat this, you’ll need to identify the variations of the terms you wish to use, then you can use a search tool like CloudNine Discovery’s Early Case Assessment application, (FirstPass®, powered by Venio FPR™), that supports "fuzzy" searching, which is a mechanism by finding alternate words that are close in spelling to the word you're looking for (usually one or two characters off).  FirstPass will display all of the words – in the collection – close to the word you’re looking for, so if you’re looking for “mining”, you can find variations such as “min1ng”, “MININ6” or even “minig” – that could be relevant.  Then, simply select the variations you wish to include in the search.  You’ll need to repeat this for each of the variations of the terms you wish to use, but it will enable you to pick up those misspellings and OCR errors to ensure completeness.

So, what do you think?  Do you use wildcards in your searches?  Are you sure you’re getting just the terms you want?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

eDiscovery Daily is Two Years Old Today!
 

It’s hard to believe that it has been two years ago today since we launched the eDiscoveryDaily blog.  Now that we’ve hit the “terrible twos”, is the blog going to start going off on rants about various eDiscovery topics, like Will McAvoy in The Newsroom?   Maybe.  Or maybe not.  Wouldn’t that be fun!

As we noted when recently acknowledging our 500th post, we have seen traffic on our site (from our first three months of existence to our most recent three months) grow an amazing 442%!  Our subscriber base has nearly doubled in the last year alone!  We now have nearly seven times the visitors to the site as we did when we first started.  We continue to appreciate the interest you’ve shown in the topics and will do our best to continue to provide interesting and useful eDiscovery news and analysis.  That’s what this blog is all about.  And, in each post, we like to ask for you to “please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic”, so we encourage you to do so to make this blog even more useful.

We also want to thank the blogs and publications that have linked to our posts and raised our public awareness, including Pinhawk, The Electronic Discovery Reading Room, Unfiltered Orange, Litigation Support Blog.com, Litigation Support Technology & News, Ride the Lightning, InfoGovernance Engagement Area, Learn About E-Discovery, Alltop, Law.com, Justia Blawg Search, Atkinson-Baker (depo.com), ABA Journal, Complex Discovery, Next Generation eDiscovery Law & Tech Blog and any other publication that has picked up at least one of our posts for reference (sorry if I missed any!).  We really appreciate it!

We like to take a look back every six months at some of the important stories and topics during that time.  So, here are some posts over the last six months you may have missed.  Enjoy!

We talked about best practices for issuing litigation holds and how issuing the litigation hold is just the beginning.

By the way, did you know that if you deleted a photo on Facebook three years ago, it may still be online?

We discussed states (Delaware, Pennsylvania and Florida) that have implemented new rules for eDiscovery in the past few months.

We talked about how to achieve success as a non-attorney in a law firm, providing quality eDiscovery services to your internal “clients” and how to be an eDiscovery consultant, and not just an order taker, for your clients.

We warned you that stop words can stop your searches from being effective, talked about how important it is to test your searches before the meet and confer and discussed the importance of the first 7 to 10 days once litigation hits in addressing eDiscovery issues.

We told you that, sometimes, you may need to collect from custodians that aren’t there, differentiated between quality assurance and quality control and discussed the importance of making sure that file counts add up to what was collected (with an example, no less).

By the way, did you know the number of pages in a gigabyte can vary widely and the same exact content in different file formats can vary by as much as 16 to 20 times in size?

We provided a book review on Zubulake’s e-Discovery and then interviewed the author, Laura Zubulake, as well.

BTW, eDiscovery Daily has had 150 posts related to eDiscovery Case Law since the blog began.  Fifty of them have been in the last six months.

P.S. – We still haven't missed a business day yet without a post.  Yes, we are crazy.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

eDiscovery Case Law: Twitter Loses Appeal in People v. Harris
 

As reported in the Gibbons E-Discovery Law Alert blog, Twitter filed an appeal of the trial court’s decision in People v. Harris with the Appellate Division, First Department in New York, arguing that Twitter users have the right to quash subpoenas pursuant to Twitter’s terms of service agreement as well as because defendants’ constitutional rights are implicated by a government-issued subpoena to a third party.  Unfortunately for Twitter, it didn’t take long for the appellate court panel to rule, as they denied Twitter’s motion for a stay of enforcement of the Trial Court’s order to produce Malcolm Harris’s tweets last week.

Attempts to Quash the Subpoena Fail

Back in April, Harris, an Occupy Wall Street activist facing criminal charges, tried to quash a subpoena seeking production of his Tweets and his Twitter account user information in his New York criminal case.  That request was rejected, so Twitter then sought to quash the subpoena themselves, claiming that the order to produce the information imposed an “undue burden” on Twitter and even forced it to “violate federal law”.

Then, on June 30, New York Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. ruled that Twitter must produce tweets and user information of Harris, noting: “If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is no proprietary interest in your tweets, which you have now gifted to the world. This is not the same as a private email, a private direct message, a private chat, or any of the other readily available ways to have a private conversation via the internet that now exist…Those private dialogues would require a warrant based on probable cause in order to access the relevant information.”  Judge Sciarrino indicated that his decision was “partially based on Twitter's then terms of service agreement”, which was subsequently modified to add the statement “You Retain Your Right To Any Content You Submit, Post Or Display On Or Through The Service.”

Twitter Continues to Fight Ruling

After the ruling, the New York District Attorney filed an order for Twitter to show cause as to why they should not be held in contempt for failure to produce the tweets. Twitter responded by seeking the stay of enforcement pending the appeal.  Last week, Twitter was given a deadline by the Trial Court during a hearing on the District Attorney’s motion to produce Harris’s information by Friday September 14 or face a finding of contempt. Judge Sciarrino even went so far as to warn Twitter that he would review their most recent quarterly financial statements in determining the appropriate financial penalty if Twitter did not obey the order.

So, what do you think?  With the appeal denied, will Twitter finally produce the plaintiff’s information?  What impact does this case have on future subpoenas of Twitter user information?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

eDiscovery Case Law: Google Awarded $1 Million from Oracle, But Denied Discovery Costs
 

As noted in SiliconBeat and ARN, Judge William Alsup ordered Oracle on Tuesday to pay Google $1 million as reimbursement for Google’s fees for a court-appointed expert in their court battle over intellectual property and Google’s Android software.  However, the ruling is only a partial victory for Google, who was seeking $4 million from Oracle in reimbursement of costs associated with the case.

Claims Against Google Dismissed Despite Inadvertent Disclosure

As you may recall, claims against Google that its Android mobile phone platform infringes Oracle's copyrights relating to the Java computer language were dismissed by Judge Alsup back on May 31.  The claims were dismissed despite a significant inadvertent disclosure of information during discovery by Google, where drafts of a privileged email were not caught by Google’s search technology since they didn’t include the words “Attorney Work Product”, nor were they yet addressed to in-house counsel.  Judge Alsup ruled late last year that the draft emails were not privileged and the Federal Circuit court upheld that ruling.  However, these rulings did not ultimately cost Google as Oracle’s claims were dismissed.  As Judge Alsup noted, “Oracle initially sought six billion dollars in damages and injunctive relief but recovered nothing after nearly two years of litigation and six weeks of trial.”  Oracle plans to appeal.

Google Seeks Recovery of Costs

As the prevailing party, Google was able to seek recovery of costs and did so, seeking nearly $4 million from Oracle.  As noted above, Judge Alsup awarded Google $1 million as reimbursement for Google’s fees for a court-appointed expert.  However, Judge Alsup rejected Google's request that Oracle also pay $2.9 million for discovery-related costs, calling the search giant's arguments "unpersuasive".

“The problem with Google's e-discovery bill of costs is that many of [the] item-line descriptions seemingly bill for 'intellectual effort' such as organizing, searching, and analyzing the discovery documents," Judge Alsup stated in the ruling. "Most egregious are attempts to bill costs for 'conferencing,' 'prepare for and participate in kickoff call,' and communications with co-workers, other vendors, and clients. These are non-taxable intellectual efforts.”

So, what do you think?  Should Google have been reimbursed more?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

eDiscovery Case Law: Citing Rule 26(g), Court Orders Plaintiff’s Counsel to Disclose Search Strategy
 

Our 501st post on the blog addresses S2 Automation LLC v. Micron Technology, No. CIV 11-0884 JB/WDS, 2012 U.S. Dist. (D. New Mexico, Aug 9, 2012), where New Mexico District Judge James Browning ordered the plaintiff’s attorneys to disclose the search strategy their client used to identify responsive documents, based on Federal Rule 26(g) that requires attorneys to sign discovery responses and certify that they are “complete and correct.”

Motion to Compel

Last October, S2 Automation filed a Complaint against Micron Technology for breach of contract, conversion, misrepresentation and unjust enrichment.  After various objections to Micron’s requests for production by S2, Micron filed a Motion to Compel, indicating that S2 Automation “has utterly failed to meet its obligation to meaningfully respond to discovery in this matter” and requested, among other things that the court order S2 Automation to identify the search strategy it used to provide responsive documents to its requests for production.

A sworn declaration from one of Micron’s attorneys indicated that, during a discovery conference, it became apparent that S2′s counsel may not have worked with their client sufficiently during the discovery process and, as a result, may have failed to provide a number of responsive documents:

“During that call, we discussed the April 25 deficiency letter and Micron’s request that S2 supplement its production. Counsel for S2 stated that he had not yet reviewed the letter in detail. We then discussed the format for production of S2′s documents. Counsel stated that he was not aware that S2 had separated attachments from e-mails, that he had delegated the process of gathering documents to S2, and that he was generally unaware of the manner in which S2 had provided the documents. Counsel also stated that he was unsure what protocol S2 followed to locate responsive documents.”

S2’s Obligations under Federal Rule 26(g)

Micron asserted in its motion to compel that S2′s counsel violated their obligations under Federal Rule 26(g), stating “it is not proper for counsel to sit back and allow the client to search for documents without active direction and participation by counsel; to the contrary, counsel must be actively involved in the search to ensure that all responsive documents have been located, preserved, and produced.”  In response, S2′s attorneys denied that they had failed to supervise the discovery process, indicating that they had “met with the client on multiple occasions during the discovery process in order to organize and respond to discovery.”

Judge Browning’s Ruling

Noting that Rule 26(g) imposes an obligation on the attorney who signs the discovery response to conduct “a reasonable inquiry into the facts and law supporting the pleading”, Judge Browning stated:

“Accordingly, it can become necessary to evaluate whether an attorney complied with his rule 26(g) obligations and to evaluate the strategy an attorney used to provide responsive discovery, with relevant circumstances including: (i) “[t]he number and complexity of the issues”; (ii) “[t]he location, nature, number and availability of potentially relevant witnesses or documents”; (iii) “[t]he extent of past working relationships between the attorney and the client, particularly in related or similar litigation”; and (iv) “[t]he time available to conduct an investigation.” 6 J. Moore, Moore’s Federal Practice, § 26.154[2][a], at 26-615 (3d ed. 2012). Consequently, the analysis in which courts must engage to evaluate whether a party’s discovery responses were adequate is often a fact-intensive inquiry that requires evaluation of the procedures the producing party adopted during discovery.”

As a result, Judge Browning ruled that S2 Automation would have to provide to Micron “its search strategy for identifying pertinent documents, including the procedures it used and how it interacted with its counsel to facilitate the production process.”

So, what do you think?  Was the ruling appropriate?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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