Our Insights on eDiscovery

You’ve got an employee suing her ex-employer for discrimination, hostile work environment and being forced to resign. During discovery, it was determined that a key email was deleted due to the employer’s routine auto-delete policy, so the plaintiff filed a motion for sanctions. Sound familiar? Yep. Was her motion granted? Nope.

Ralph Losey describes a unique case this week in his e-Discovery Team ® blog (Poor Plaintiff’s Counsel, Can’t Even Find a CAR, Much Less Drive One). In Northstar Marine, Inc. v. Huffman, the defendant’s motion to enforce the parties’ document production agreement was granted after Alabama Magistrate Judge William E. Cassady rejected the plaintiff’s excuse that “it is having difficulty locating an inexpensive provider of electronic search technology to assist with discovery”.

The opinion in Kwasniewski v. Sanofi-Aventis U.S. LLC suggests that producing parties can satisfy their obligation to produce documents in an organized manner by offering a table of contents, rendering text searchable, indicating which data responds to which request, and including certain metadata, such as Bates numbers.

If you’re hoping to get away with failing to preserve data in eDiscovery, you might want to think again if your case appears in the docket for the Southern District of New York with Judge Shira Scheindlin presiding.

In Mali v. Federal Insurance Co., the Second Circuit explained the distinctions between two types of adverse inference instructions: a sanction for misconduct versus an explanatory instruction that details the jury’s fact-finding abilities. Because the lower court opted to give a permissive adverse inference instruction, which is not a punishment, the court did not err by not requiring the defendant to show that the plaintiffs acted with a culpable state of mind.