A Servient Resource
Briefs on the court rulings shaping eDiscovery, published as courts rule.
Preservation, spoliation, privilege, proportionality, ESI protocols, and the sanctions that follow. Each brief is a short read on one decision — with the full opinion attached, so you can go to the source.
A bus video was taped over, the plaintiff won a comprehensive spoliation instruction, and the jury returned a defense verdict anyway. Affirmed on appeal.
Galindez v. Rhode Island Public Transit Authority · R.I. · July 30, 2026
A bus video was taped over, the plaintiff won a comprehensive spoliation instruction, and the jury returned a defense verdict anyway. Affirmed on appeal.
Delaware's Court of Chancery found spoliation when a vendor's lapsed software subscription deleted accounting data, and gave the exhibit built on it no weight.
Nearly five years after imaging 42 devices, the government moved to shed 23 unreviewed terabytes, and the court held it could not order otherwise.
Four documents clawed back from a 2.5-million-document production were held stripped of privilege by the crime-fraud exception and ordered produced anyway.
A platform that files suit is still a communications provider, and the Stored Communications Act still governs what it can hand over in its own case.
A producing party must run a reasonable search whether or not its opponent proposes search terms first, the Southern District of New York holds.
An Indiana court sanctioned a rehab facility under Rule 37(e)(1) for losing Teams messages and surveillance video despite a prompt litigation hold.
A Western District of Washington court held that an agreed ESI protocol's custodian list cannot shrink a party's Rule 34 duty to collect relevant documents.
The Delaware Court of Chancery held that a producing party who withdrew its offer of a hit report cannot lean on the untested claim that it had nothing.
A District of Rhode Island magistrate refused to order an itemized index of a production and applied Rule 34's default form of production instead.
A pro se plaintiff's spoliation motion fails: the prison preserved exactly the ten-minute video window he asked for, and the incident fell just outside it.
An ESI protocol requiring parent-child relationships to be preserved does not let a producer slipsheet out attachments it deems non-responsive.
Judge Bates refused a Rule 502(d) no-waiver order over the plaintiffs' objection and ordered a tiered hyperlink procedure into the ESI protocol.
A Vietnamese supplier's $840M case against Amazon was dismissed with prejudice after metadata exposed its purchase orders as print-to-PDF fabrications.
An E.D. Pa. magistrate judge ordered ESI from personal devices and departed employees produced, yet declined case-ending sanctions despite the factors.
The Tenth Circuit held that Rule 37(e) fixes the burden of proving prejudice from lost ESI on no one, leaving courts discretion to allocate it.
A California magistrate judge ordered Uber to produce a random 300-document sample of its TAR training set, putting the coding calls behind AI review to the test.
A California magistrate judge denied motions to bar keyword culling before GenAI review and to audit its metrics, an early map for defending AI review.
We've received your message and will be in touch shortly.