http://ow.ly/7nSoc
An article by Dennis Kiker posted on the e-Discovery Myth blog of the law firm LeClair Ryan.
This article discusses a situation in which outside counsel and their corporate client were not acting in concert with one another. The article references the specific case of United Central Bank v. Kanan Fashions, Inc., 2011 WL 4396856 (N.D. Ill. Sep. 21, 2011).
The articles provides a link to a summary of the case, and states that the corporate client admitted that a server held relevant electronically stored information, but the server was sold to another party and shipped to Dubai.
The article states, "This is the new e-discovery math: bad acts + bad actors = long opinions." (A sentence the writers of this Litigation Support Technology and News blog are sure to repeat.)
The article further mentions, "the magistrate judge had to labor over 20 pages of detail to explain just what the defendants had done and why it was wrong."
In this particular matter, the defense counsel was not sanctioned based on the bad acts of the client, however the court did suggest they could have done more to stop this from happening. The author questions whether or not defense counsel really could have done more, and states, "Certainly, when dealing with a new client or one with which you don’t have an existing relationship of trust, written instructions for the legal hold and active involvement in the process are prudent. But I worry that outlier cases such as United Central Bank have a tendency to taint even strong attorney-client relationships with an element of mistrust that needn’t be there."
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