Our Insights on eDiscovery

In Banas v. Volcano Corp., California District Judge William H. Orrick determined that a defendant’s approach to discovery in which identifying the relevant documents by “triangulating” the defendant’s employees wasn’t discussed with the plaintiff beforehand in a meet and confer. Despite the fact that the court did “not find that defendant’s production technique was unreasonable”, the defendant was ordered to supplement its responses since the approach wasn’t discussed and it left out multiple deponents.

In Kwan Software Engineering, Inc. v. the defendant Technologies, LLC, California District Judge Susan Illston denied the plaintiff’s motion for terminating sanctions against the defendant for late, non-searchable productions, but did order the defendant to produce documents in a searchable format with metadata and extended the pretrial schedule so that the plaintiff would not be prejudiced by the late productions.

The news continues to get worse for Samsung Electronics Co. in its colossal legal battle with Apple Inc. A California federal jury ruled on November 21 that Samsung owes Apple $290.5 million for selling mobile devices that infringed five iPhone and iPad patents, bringing the total awarded for infringing on Apple products to almost $930 million.

In the case In re Pradaxa (Dabigatran Etexilate) Products Liability Litigation, Chief District Judge David R. Herndon ruled that at least in the Seventh Circuit, the duty to preserve is triggered not when litigation is “reasonably foreseeable” but when “a litigant knew or should have known that litigation was imminent.”