Our Insights on eDiscovery

In Delgado v. Tarabochia, et al., Washington District Judge Robert S. Lasnik granted in part and denied in part the plaintiff’s motion to quash subpoenas for personal phone records and bank records, finding that phone records before the plaintiff’s hand injury on the defendant’s fishing boat were “of vital importance to defendants’ theory of the case”, but that the need for pre-incident bank records was not proportional to the needs of the case and that, with regard to subpoenas of post-incident data, defendants were “fishing”.

In Ortiz v. Amazon.com LLC, et al, California Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James ordered the plaintiff, who failed to produce court-ordered cell phone records because the account was in his wife’s name and refused to provide her information, to provide defendant Golden State with his cell phone account holder’s name and address so that defendant could subpoena the cell phone records from her. Judge James also ordered the plaintiff to appear for a deposition in San Francisco, as originally scheduled, instead of Los Angeles (where the plaintiff had moved).

In Winfield v. City of New York, New York Magistrate Judge Katherine H. Parker, ruling on a debate of what constitutes privileged ESI, denied the plaintiff’s request for a “quick peek” at 3,300 documents listed on the defendant’s privilege log, opting to propose instead for a special master to conduct a privilege review of those documents.

In Nunes v. Rushton, Utah District Judge Jill N. Parrish, ruling that the plaintiff was prejudiced by the deletion of one of the defendant’s Google “sock puppet” accounts, granted the plaintiff’s motion for sanctions in part, ordering an adverse instruction to the jury regarding the “bad faith” deletion of that account. Judge Parrish denied the motion with regard to several other accounts, ruling that the plaintiff was not prejudiced by deletion of those accounts (as most of the information was still available or recoverable).