Our Insights on eDiscovery

As we noted the past three days, eDiscoveryDaily published 98 posts related to eDiscovery case decisions and activities over the past year, covering 62 unique cases! Yesterday, we looked back at cases related to admissibility and the duty to preserve and produce electronically stored information (ESI). Today, let’s take a look back at cases related to sanctions and spoliation.

As we noted the past two days, eDiscoveryDaily published 98 posts related to eDiscovery case decisions and activities over the past year, covering 62 unique cases! Yesterday, we looked back at cases related to social media and the first cases approving technology assisted review. Today, let’s take a look back at cases related to admissibility and the duty to preserve and produce electronically stored information (ESI).

2012 was quite a year from an eDiscovery standpoint, with a number of cases that impacted how organizations handle discovery. As we did last year, it seems appropriate to review cases from 2012 before moving forward to this year. eDiscoveryDaily published 98 posts related to eDiscovery case decisions and activities over the past year, covering 62 unique cases! Perhaps you missed some of these? Now is your chance to catch up!

In Moore v. The Weinstein Company LLC, noting it had wide discretion to determine costs recoverable by a prevailing party under federal statutes providing for the taxation of costs, a court reduced costs awarded for eDiscovery expenditures based on its analysis of which costs were reasonable, necessary, and taxable.

In United States v. Hamilton, the Fourth Circuit found that the district court had not abused its discretion in finding that e-mails between the defendant and his wife did not merit marital privilege protection because the defendant had used his office computer and his work e-mail account to send and receive the communications and because he had not taken steps to protect the e-mails in question, even after his employer instituted a policy permitting inspection of e-mails and he was on notice of the policy.

In Haskins v. First American Title Insurance Co., a court found that an insurance company had a duty to issue a litigation hold to its independent title agents because litigation was reasonably foreseeable and the duty to preserve extends to third parties, as long as the documents are “within a party’s possession, custody, or control.” Although it did not have physical possession, the insurance company controlled the agents’ documents because it had “‘the legal right or ability to obtain the documents from [the agents] upon demand.’”

In Fidelity National Title Insurance Co. v. Captiva Lake Investments, LLC, where a party’s “conduct [did not] rise[ ] to the level of a willful violation of the order compelling production” because it was continually working toward the proper production of documents requested by its adversary, a court concluded that the adversary’s motion for sanctions was premature.