Electronic Discovery and Computer Forensics Case List - Kroll Ontrack

“unadulterated fishing expedition” and that the plaintiffs’ request was meant to “simply ‘troll’ the
‘electronic pond’ to eliminate any skepticism regarding production.” The court disagreed with the
defendant’s objections and granted production of the computer hard drive with some limitations. It
ordered an interdependent computer forensics expert to image the hard drive and provide a report
to each party of the information contained on therein. The defendant was to provide the plaintiffs
with information on the computer concerning any of the plaintiffs, however the court held that any
other confidential information about non-party patients and employees was irrelevant and beyond
the scope of plaintiffs’ claims. The parties were ordered to submit a protective order concerning
any confidential information discovered on the hard drive. Furthermore, the parties were ordered to
share the cost of the hard drive imaging and examination.
� Williams v. Sprint/United Mgmt. Co., No. 03-2200 (D. Kan. Jan. 23, 2007). On remand from the
district court judge, the magistrate issued an order explaining his reasons for denying sanctions
against the defendant for failure to produce documents in their native format. In this employment
discrimination claim, the plaintiffs filed a motion for sanctions against the defendant for failure to
produce several spreadsheets which were originally produced in hard copy. The plaintiffs argued
that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure compelled the defendant to produce documents in their
native format despite an earlier agreement between the parties stating that the parties could
produce documents in a non-native .tiff format. The defendant argued that they attempted, in good
faith, to produce the spreadsheets in a native format as quickly as possible and did not delay
production of the documents in order to gain a tactical advantage. The magistrate judge agreed
with the defendant and held that there was no evidence of bad faith on part of the defendant
because it gave reasonable explanations as to any delay and impossibility of producing native
format documents. Further, the court found that the unique circumstances of the discovery disputes
demonstrate that there was no bad faith. The court also held that any duplicative production of
documents occurred only as a result of the plaintiffs’ multiple discovery requests and not as an
intentional tactic by the defendant used to confuse or frustrate the plaintiffs.
� Apsley v. Boeing Co., 2007 WL 163201 (D. Kan. Jan. 18, 2007). In an age discrimination class
action, the plaintiffs moved to compel the defendant to produce e-mails relevant to the claims. The
requested e-mails covered a five year period and several hundred employees. The plaintiffs
provided search terms to the defendant to reduce the amount of relevant emails. The defendant
argued that a production of five years of e-mails from several hundred employees would be unduly
burdensome and costly. In some situations, the defendant argued, an e-mail search of one
employee could take one person as long as an entire day to perform the search. The plaintiffs
argued, however, that the benefits to the plaintiffs would be outweighed by the burden to
defendant. The court found that it could not make a decision on burden versus benefit and
requested additional information from the parties. The requested information included how the
search would be conducted, the search terms, specific employees’ e-mail to be searched, who
should bear the production costs, and other balancing questions.
� Williams v. Sprint/United Mgmt. Co., 2006 WL 3691604 (D. Kan. Dec. 12, 2006). In an
employment termination case, the plaintiffs moved the court for native file production of e-mails
which had been previously produced by the defendant in a hardcopy format. In the original
production, the e-mails had spreadsheets that were detached and provided as separate documents
in their native, electronic format. The plaintiff claimed that without the native e-mail, the plaintiff was
forced to match the hardcopy e-mails with the corresponding electronic spreadsheet attachment
using a correlation table created by the defendant, which caused the plaintiff to incur more time
and cost. The defendant argued that the parties agreed during pre-trial conferences that any
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