Case Law & Court Rules

In this breach of contract claim, Plaintiff moved for sanctions against Defendant for failing to produce emails related to the litigation. Specifically, Plaintiff asked the Court to grant a motion in limine to instruct the jurors that they may presume Defendant carried out or allowed the destruction of relevant evidence favorable to Plaintiff. Defendant argued […]

In a discrimination case (plaintiff had attempted to rent an apartment and she was allegedly refused because of her two young children), several of Plaintiff’s social media posts (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) were relevant because, in Defendant’s view, they provided evidence of Plaintiff’s “emotional state and living circumstances after the alleged discrimination”. After some of those posts disappeared, […]

In this insurance case, Defendant State Farm Fire and Casualty Company, objected to the Special Master’s discovery order compelling the answer to a set of interrogatories on ground of burdensomeness. The Western District of Missouri denied the motion to vacate. Labrier v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co ., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 61246 (W.D. […]

In New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s sanction case (“deflategate”), the Second Circuit upheld the decision of the Commissioner imposing sanctions on Brady for his involvement in a scheme to deflate footballs in the 2015 AFC. A significant issue in front of the court was whether it was proper for the Commissioner to derive the […]

On January 13, 2016, the District of Connecticut declined to compel production of all ESI documents resulting from agreed search terms. Here the parties’ counsel had agreed to a list of search terms which resulted in approximately 38,000 documents but Defendant did not produce them all, produced only 2,214 pages. Plaintiff objected that Defendant was omitting “highly […]

On January 12, 2016, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York found that manipulation of emails deserves sanction under Rule 37(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, even if the manipulation did not delete the original emails. The Court had to decide on the reach of the newly amended Rule 37(e) of the […]

Four years after Da Silva Moorev. Publicis Groupe., 287 F.R.D. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 2012), laid the foundation for use of predictive coding or technology assisted review (TAR) in electronic discovery, Judge Peck has issued a new opinion dealing with predictive coding. In this fraud case, he stressed that it is “inappropriate to hold TAR to a […]

On April 27, 2016, the US Ohio District Court granted Plaintiff’s preservation motion requiring a non-party to preserve certain evidence, but declined to impose preservation to be carried out through forensic imaging. Plaintiff demonstrated a real danger that evidence in non-party possession will be destroyed absent a court order. The Court observed that the non-party […]

There is no duty to produce documents on which defendant does not any legal entitlement nor any practical ability to reach. Grayson v. GE, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 44325 (D. Conn. Apr. 1, 2016). In a putative class action, Plaintiffs sued General Electric’s (“GE”) claiming that certain models of microwave (branded GE) defectively designed or […]

A California federal court held that sanctions for spoliation are proper when a party consciously disregards its obligations to preserve relevant evidence (and in particular did not make sure that the documents were irretrievable before discarding the device allegedly destroyed by a power surge) and as result the other side is deprived of the documents […]