Electronic Discovery and Computer Forensics Case List - Kroll Ontrack

� Edelen v. Campbell Soup Co., 2010 WL 774186 (N.D.Ga. Mar. 2, 2010). In this race and gender
discrimination litigation, the plaintiff filed several objections to a magistrate judge’s discovery order
which denied the plaintiff’s motion for sanctions and directed the plaintiff pay the defendants
attorneys’ fees associated with the defendants’ previous motion to narrow the scope of ESI
discovery requests. The plaintiff argued for sanctions alleging the defendants excessively
designated documents as confidential, voluntarily produced privileged documents and failed to
meet and confer with the plaintiff. Regarding the plaintiff’s ESI discovery request, the defendants
claimed the plaintiff’s proposal spanned a three year period and would produce 474,456
documents for one year alone since it encompassed 50 custodians and more than 55 search
terms. Adopting the magistrate’s discovery recommendations in full, the court dismissed the
plaintiff’s sanctions claims and noted the plaintiff repeatedly failed to comply with court’s orders to
narrow the scope of the ESI production requests. Thus, the court found the magistrate’s
recommendation, which awarded attorneys’ fees based on the plaintiff’s noncompliant behavior in
the discovery process, to be reasonable.
� CBT Flint Partners, LLC v. Return Path, Inc., 2009 WL 5159761 (N.D. Ga. Dec. 30, 2009). In
this patent infringement action, the defendants filed a motion to tax the costs associated with using
an e-discovery vendor to aid in the production of 1.4 million electronic documents and six versions
of source code. Objecting, the plaintiff argued that fees associated with the collection of documents
for production are not taxable under 28 U.S.C. § 1920. Although noting that a judicial division of
opinion exists as to whether U.S.C § 1920 allows recovery, the court cited the highly technical
nature and necessity of e-discovery services in the electronic age to overrule the plaintiff’s
objection and hold the $268,311.22 in costs to be recoverable. In supporting its finding, the court
reasoned that the "[t]axation of these costs will encourage litigants to exercise restraint in
burdening the opposing party with the huge cost of unlimited demands for electronic discovery."
� Kipperman v. Onex Corp., 2009 WL 1473708 (N.D.Ga. May 27, 2009). In this constructive
transfer and fraud case, the plaintiff sought sanctions in the form of a default judgment against the
defendant for discovery abuses. The plaintiff asserted that the defendant repeatedly defied court
orders, unilaterally narrowed the scope of restoration and production of court-ordered backup
tapes, unilaterally redacted court-ordered produced documents to the point that such documents
became unusable and misrepresented to the court the likely relevance of e-mails sought. The
defendants maintained that their redactions were in compliance with the court’s orders and insisted
that the broad discovery requested by the plaintiff would likely be fruitless. The court agreed with
the plaintiffs that the defendant had blatantly disregarded court orders by making
misrepresentations during discovery and stated it was deeply disturbed by the defendant’s
discovery conduct in what it regarded as "a textbook case of discovery abuse." However, the court
declined to order default sanctions, citing novel issues of liability and noting that granting a default
judgment in this case might be a grant of the largest default judgment sought in United States
history. The court alternatively awarded $1,022,700 in monetary sanctions against the defendant to
be paid to the plaintiff.
� Kipperman v. Onex Corp., 2008 WL 4372005 (N.D.Ga. Sept. 19, 2008). In this litigation, the
defendants sought relief from having to review and produce all results from an e-mail search on the
defendants’ backup tapes, arguing that the broad search terms resulted in thousands of irrelevant
hits. The defendant asked to be excused from producing (1) irrelevant documents, (2) documents
responsive to one specific transaction, and (3) documents captured from the e-mail boxes of one
specific subsidiary company. Finding the documents referred to in the second and third objections
were “highly unlikely” to garner relevant information, the court granted the requested relief.
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