Source: http://www.leventhalpllc.com/2019/02/taafomft-v-2-0-rev-1/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 15:05:28+00:00

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That is, Employee A quits Company A to compete against Company A at Company B.
And, in Stratasys v. Krampitz, we have the common claim of “spoliation of evidence” (which we apparently cannot call “destruction of evidence” because we are lawyers and we like obscure words?) — that is, the claim that Employee A stole Company A’s confidential information and then destroyed the evidence so as not to be caught when sued.
In Stratasys v. Krampitz, the mess goes deeper: we have a ferocious battle of forensic experts, one of whom says he has uncovered strong evidence of wrongful spoliation of evidence. The other expert attacks the integrity and professionalism of the first and suggests that there is no evidence of any misconduct whatsoever.
Employees use their personal cell phones for business purposes. Employees use their company-issued computers for personal matters (like surfing the internet or posting selfies). Employees use cloud-based storage like Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive, i.e., large offsite data storage centers outside of the control and view of employers.
So, when Employee A leaves Company A to compete against it at Company B, he almost always has personal data on his business devices and, also, business data on her personal devices. And he might delete these materials when he decamps (the personal information because it is private, the business information because she might be accused of stealing it if she retains it).
How do we distinguish “innocent data leakage” (personal data deleted from business devices, personal devices reflecting deleted business data) from a definitive finding of malfeasance, i.e., evidence of theft of company data?
Here’s a common persuasive piece of evidence: Employee A downloads (or uploads) a massive amount of business data to personal digital storage just before decamping.
Here’s another: a refusal to produce data storage devices or documents such as financial records that might reflect evidence of suspicious expenditures (say, a terabyte hard drive purchased just before decamping)?
In Stratasys v. Krampitz (or one might call the e-disgustery case-within-the-case, Lanterman v. Harrington), the defense to the claim of spoliation is a full-on personal attack of Stratasys’ forensic expert and his conclusions.
We take no side (and disclose that Mr. Lanterman’s firm is a sponsor of this blog). We only express relief that, in our practice, it has been a long time since we have been enmeshed in a complex, protracted, and sometimes excruciatingly expensive digital conflagration.
Update (October 22, 2018): Long-time Minnesota Litigator readers will remember our TAAFOMFT series (which stands for “These are a few of my favorite things,” a sarcastic preface to posts about things we hate).
One of our favorite things (not) which we know we share with an enormous number of civil litigators, judges, and parties to civil litigation in the United States and beyond is e-discovery.
And who pays for that? This is the subject of our earlier post, below.
Is there any recourse when the tail starts wagging the dog, when litigation costs due to ESI demands are blown out of proportion by one side (particularly in a case (or for a defense) that is eventually deemed to have been without merit)?
But even relatively small litigants represented by reasonable lawyers might find themselves sucked into the all-consuming vortex. What then?
A company called East Coast Test Prep (d/b/a Achieve Test Prep (“ATP”)) brought a lawsuit against a web-site, allnurses.com, to fight anonymous criticism and unflattering statements about ATP in comments on the allnurses website.
And now the principal Defendants seek award of their substantial e-discovery expenses from Plaintiff ATP. Here is ATP’s response.
This may be a close question.
What ESI measures are “reasonable” for one party to impose on another? If the costs spiral out of control, whose fault is that?
If only from the point of view of trying to ensure “best practices” by civil litigants, we hope that courts will, at least in some cases, shift e-discovery costs.
When civil litigation gives parties a potentially devastating weapon (e.g., broad rights of discovery), courts need to hold parties (and/or their lawyers) responsible for misuse. Otherwise, the justice system itself becomes an accelerant rather than a retardant for civil litigation combat.
Update (March 2, 2016) (under the headline: TAAFOMFT, v. 2.0 (rev. 2): E-Discovery = E-Disgustery (You Are Entitled to All Your Costs If You Win! But not really.): Imagine that your company is sued based on a claim that a product your company provided for a construction project contained “foreign object debris” (“FOD”) and the FOD caused $30 million in project owner’s damages. Now imagine the claims fail and you win judgment in the case. As the prevailing party, you are entitled to your “costs” by federal statute.
“A prevailing party is presumptively entitled to recovery of all its costs.” 168th & Dodge, LP v. Rave Reviews Cinemas, LLC, 501 F.3d 945, 958 (8th Cir. 2007) (emphasis added). Yay! But wait. First, as all civil litigators know, “attorneys’ fees” are not part of “costs” so what a layperson might consider the big-ticket “cost” is not a “cost” at all as far as the cost-award statute is concerned.
To the extent e-discovery costs represent the conversion of native files to TIFF, the scanning of documents to create digital duplicates, and the conversion of VHS recordings to DVD format, such costs are taxable under §1920(4).
Although there may be strong policy reasons in general, or compelling equitable circumstances in a particular case, to award the full costs of electronic discovery to the prevailing party, the federal courts lack the authority to do so, either generally or in particular cases, under the cost statute.
In other words, under federal law, a trial court may award a prevailing party its costs — it is entitled to all its costs — but the trial court will ignore hundreds of thousands of dollars of the prevailing party’s costs because the courts lack the authority to award them.
“Alice in Wonderland”. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Original post (3/19/2013) (under headline: TAAFOMFT, v. 2.0 (rev. 1): E-Disgustery & “Morton’s Fork”): It is only a matter of time, in almost any litigation of a certain magnitude, when a signal gets crossed and there is an “information security breach.” And this is where the fun begins in earnest!
Following up on yesterdays post on “some of my favorite things” (inadvertent disclosure fire-drills and motion practice), I noted a recently filed third-party complaint in a case pending before U.S. District Court Judge Donovan W. Frank (D. Minn.) (the original complaint is here), rich with a gooey layer of jam in the delicious concoction of civil litigation mille-feuille gateau de merde.
Everyone makes mistakes. When the stakes are sufficiently high, though, there is a magical and almost inevitable human trait for all potentially responsible people and organizations to go to the greatest possible lengths to explain why a bad outcome is someone else’s fault (see, e.g., news coverage of J.P. Morgan London Whale Congressional hearings).
Another closely related widespread and widely recognized human quality — maybe unsavory but also very understandable — is to not want to pay money to business partners when the disappointing joint feast is capped off with a $712,920.49 bill for a culinary clustercake.
Kroll failed to electronically segregate “Confidential” and “Highly Confidential” documents, causing this to be done manually instead, which was very expensive and unnecessarily time consuming.
Kroll did not have a methodology by which a user could create a search folder of documents that omit documents containing a specific search term(s). As a result, the user could not segregate “Confidential” and “Highly Confidential” documents, causing this to be done manually instead, which was an expensive and time consuming process.
These are all merely allegations, of course. [Editor’s note: (And later discovery in the case appeared to suggest they were fabrications to dodge the big bill.)] And I note that in the nearly three years of related litigation, the docket does not reflect any fights over inadvertent production. So maybe this is not so much a revision of the previous TAAFOMFT as a Morton’s Fork. That is, civil litigators (and their clients) can either sup on the nauseating humble pie of inadvertent disclosure or, maybe alternately, they cough up $712,920.49 for the clustercake. Either way, they all need to have Rolaids on hand.
Finally, the foul dessert choice is almost always related to how well the main course played out. Devon IT’s long battle with formidable adversaries, simply by virtue of its cost and duration (and its fighting with its own lawyers), appears to be going very badly for the company. Either the high cost of a pristine production, the challenge of huge e-discovery bills, or the set-back of inadvertent disclosure is undoubtedly palatable, maybe even delicious, with a digestif of Cuvee Leonie paid for by one’s adversaries.

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