Court Refuses to Order Additional Custodial Production

20 Jul 2015

In Pan American Life Insurance Co. v. Louisiana Acquisitions Corp., et. al., Case No. 13-5027 (Jul. 9, 2015), the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana considered Plaintiff’s Motion to Compel production of additional ESI from a yet unsearched custodian.

After Defendants’ initial document production, Plaintiff sought production of additional ESI related to a CEO for one of the Defendants. Defendants objected to the ESI request, claiming that Plaintiff had waived the right to the ESI by failing to object to Defendants’ electronic discovery protocol, which included the CEO’s name as a search term but did not include him as an ESI custodian.  Based on the protocol, Defendants produced records retrieved by searching for the CEO’s name but did not collect his custodial documents.

The court held that because Defendants had used the CEO’s name as a search term in its first production, another search would be unlikely to produce more results. The court concluded that it would be a waste of resources to have Defendants do another search for more ESI when they had already searched all of their ESI for documents related to the CEO.

ILS – Plaintiff Electronic Discovery Experts