In Flagg v. City of Detroit, the Sixth Circuit held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in issuing a permissive rather than mandatory adverse inference instruction for the defendant’s deletion of emails, noting that the district court has discretion in determining the strength of the inference to be applied.
read moreIn Nuance Communications Inc. v. Abbyy Software House et al., California District Judge Jeffrey S. White refused Wednesday to dismiss Nuance Communications Inc.’s patent infringement suit against Lexmark International Inc. and Abbyy Software House, and awarded reimbursement of plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees and costs in excess of $130,000 as part of discovery abuse sanctions resulting from the late production of relevant documents from Abbyy.
read moreIn Gordon v. Kaleida Health, New York Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio dismissed (without prejudice) the plaintiffs’ motion to compel the defendant to meet and confer to establish an agreed protocol for implementing the use of predictive coding software after the defendants stated that they were prepared to meet and confer with the plaintiffs and their non-disqualified ESI consultants regarding the defendants’ predictive coding process.
read moreIn April, we referenced Henry Kelston’s report in Law Technology News that another major set of amendments to the discovery provisions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is getting closer and could be adopted within the year. Now, the amendments are one step closer to enactment as they have been approved for public comment.
read moreIn United States ex rel. Becker v. Tools & Metals, Inc., a qui tam False Claims Act litigation, the plaintiffs sought, and the court awarded, costs for, among other things, uploading ESI, creating a Relativity index, and processing data over the objection that expenses should be limited to “reasonable out-of-pocket expenses which are part of the costs normally charged to a fee-paying client.” The court also approved electronic hosting costs, rejecting a defendant’s claim that “reasonableness is determined based on the number of documents used in the litigation.” However, the court refused to award costs for project management and for extracting data from hard drives where the plaintiff could have used better means to conduct a “targeted extraction of information.”
read moreNegotiating search terms with opposing counsel has become commonplace to agree on the scope of discovery. However, when you negotiate terms with the other side, you could be agreeing to produce more than you think. Craig Ball’s latest article in Law Technology News discusses the issues and tries to answer the question: Are Keywords Just Filters?
read moreOver the past few weeks, we have talked about the benefits and capabilities of Forensic Toolkit (FTK) Imager from AccessData (and obtaining your own free copy), how to create a disk image and how to add evidence items with FTK Imager for the purpose of reviewing the contents of evidence items, such as physical drives or images that you’ve created. This week, let’s discuss how to export files and how to create a custom content image of a targeted collection of files.
read moreWhile we may be “just a bit behind” Google in popularity (900 million visits per month), we’re proud to announce that yesterday eDiscoveryDaily reached the 200,000 visit milestone! It took us a little over 21 months to reach 100,000 visits and just over 11 months to get to 200,000 (don’t tell my boss, he’ll expect 300,000 in 5 1/2 months). When we reach key milestones, we like to take a look back at some of the recent stories we’ve covered, so here are some recent eDiscovery items of interest.
read moreSharon Nelson wrote a terrific post about the “controversy” regarding the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Enron Data Set in her Ride the Lightning blog (Is the Enron E-Mail Data Set Worth All the Mudslinging?). I wanted to repeat some of her key points here and offer some of my own perspective directly from sitting in on the Data Set team during the EDRM Annual Meeting earlier this month.
read moreIf you think discovery violations by the other side can cause you problems, imagine being this guy. As reported by WRAL.com in Durham, North Carolina, the defense in State of North Carolina v. Raven S. Abaroa filed a Motion to Dismiss the Case for Discovery Violations after the state produced a forensic image of a hard drive (in the middle of trial) that had been locked away in the Durham Police Department for eight years.
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