Our Insights on eDiscovery

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.

Considering proportionality and accessibility concerns in EEOC v. Original Honeybaked Ham Co. of Georgia, Colorado Magistrate Judge Michael Hegarty held that where a party had showed certain of its adversaries’ social media content and text messages were relevant, the adversaries must produce usernames and passwords for their social media accounts, usernames and passwords for e-mail accounts and blogs, and cell phones used to send or receive text messages to be examined by a forensic expert as a special master in camera.

Last year, the trend seemed to be to award the prevailing party reimbursement of eDiscovery costs. Now, that trend appears to have been reversed with those requests being denied (or reversed) by the courts. Now, here is another case where reimbursement of eDiscovery costs was denied.