Amended Rules Five Months Later: Early Trends in Case Law and What It Means
A motion for an adverse inference was denied in Pratt v. Robbins, et al., 2024 WL 234730, Case No. 5:20-cv-170-GCM (W.D. N.C. Jan. 22, 2024) where Defendants failed to preserve or produce a video that might have contained...more
A review of recent case law by EDRM Guardian Partner Exterro’s E-Discovery Case Law Project - Five or so years ago, legal professionals were hearing about “the end of sanctions.” Changes in the Federal Rules of Civil...more
Corporate counsel often shoulder the burden of managing the entire Legal Hold process for their organization. That means on top of everything else, they must issue, execute and ensure compliance with required legal holds...more
Video surveillance is ubiquitous today and often sought in connection with injuries or litigation. As a result, courts are increasingly presented with disputes relating to the preservation and production of surveillance...more
Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e)(2), imposition of the most severe sanctions for failure to preserve relevant electronically stored information — a presumption that the information lost was unfavorable, an...more
Two Recent Cases Highlight the Spoliation Thresholds in Rule 37(e) - With the 2015 FRCP amendments quickly nearing a half-decade in existence, case-law continues to define how these rules are upheld in court, especially...more
Whether we like it or not, a reality of today’s world is that often important business is conducted by text messages. And so, when it is time to issue a litigation hold notice, you must include an instruction to preserve text...more
You may have read my colleague Starling Underwood’s post on two recent Second Circuit decisions discussing sanctions for spoliation. If you have not, I encourage you to read it here. The two cases Starling addressed, one...more
By Memorandum Opinion entered by the Honorable Maryellen Noreika in Cignex Datamatics, Inc. v. Lam Research Corp., Civil Action No. 17-320-MN (D.Del. March 11, 2019), the Court denied the motion of defendant Lam Research...more
...For those of us who practice regularly in the ediscovery realm, the December 1, 2015 amendment to Rule 37(e) was a much needed game-changer. In simple terms, amended Rule 37(e) eliminated the risk of the severest sanctions...more
The ninth edition of The E-Discovery Digest focuses on recent decisions addressing the scope and application of the attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine, spoliation, and discovery responses....more
Within two years of its implementation, several cases show that amended Rule 37(e) is having its intended impact, as judges are carefully applying the criteria articulated in the Rule prior to ordering curative measures or...more
The eighth edition of The E-Discovery Digest focuses on recent decisions addressing the scope and application of the attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine, spoliation, and discovery responses....more
The seventh edition of The E-Discovery Digest focuses on recent decisions addressing the scope and application of the attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine, spoliation, and discovery responses....more
In Hsueh v. N.Y. State Dep’t of Fin. Servs., (No. 15 Civ. 3401 [PAC], 2017 WL 1194706 [S.D.N.Y. Mar. 31, 2017]) the Southern District imposed spoliation sanctions (specifically, an adverse inference) on the plaintiff in a...more
A recent case offers a cautionary tale of how courts may cite to the requirements of amended Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e), which governs imposing sanctions for failure to preserve electronically stored information...more
We’ve all been there. Your friends throw you in the pool with your phone in your pocket. You repeatedly slice your finger on shards of glass from your phone’s shattered screen. Or, maybe you forget your phone isn’t waterproof...more
If you’re involved in a suit in federal court, then the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure apply to you. Rule 26(b) provides, among other things, that parties may obtain discovery regarding any non-privileged matter that is...more
When the need arises, a litigation hold should be implemented quickly and effectively to avoid the inadvertent destruction or overwriting of potentially responsive data. The time to implement a litigation hold may be when it...more
The application of Rule 37(e) may limit spoliation litigation to issues relevant to underlying claims and defenses. A key component in plaintiffs’ playbook when facing a corporate defendant is to attempt to try cases...more
For years, companies have battled different sanction standards for the failure to preserve documents. This led to over-preservation, where, to avoid accusations of “negligent” failure, companies preserved every shred of...more