A Blog About Intellectual Property Litigation and the District of Delaware


Entries for tag: E-mail Production

Searching with Search Terms
AI-Generated, displayed with permission

This is a dispute I've seen come up in a few cases. The D. Del. Default Standard for Discovery includes a provision about search terms, setting forth that if a party uses search terms to locate responsive documents, it must disclose the search terms and allow the opposing party to request up to 10 additional terms.

This provision can cause some confusion. Sometimes parties read the Court's Default Standard, see the search term provision, and think that's the only way to collect ESI. Or, sometimes, a party really wants to dictate search terms to the other side, and argues that the Default Standard requires the use of search terms.

It doesn't. A party can elect …

PLEASE STAND BY . . . while we figure out why we only produced 13 e-mails
PLEASE STAND BY . . . while we figure out why we only produced 13 e-mails RCA

Yesterday, Magistrate Judge Fallon granted a motion for sanctions against One World Technologies, Inc., a defendant in a patent action, for failing to produce the bulk of its e-mail until 13 months after the plaintiff's initial request.

Defendant One World initially produced only 13 e-mails in response to plaintiff's requests, served back in April 2020. According to a later declaration of counsel, One World's attorneys had received multiple gigabyte's worth of .pst files containing e-mail from the agreed-upon custodians. But they found those files to be corrupted, and they relied on their clients' determination that all but 134 of the e-mails were unrecoverable. …