Extract from Doug Austin’s article “Court Rules for Defendant on TAR and (Mostly) Custodian Disputes”
In a case I covered last week, a court ruled to include most of 35 custodians in discovery; this week, the requesting party wasn’t so lucky…
In Coventry Capital U.S., LLC v. EEA Life Settlements, Inc., et al. No. 17 Civ. 7417 (VM) (SLC) (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 16, 2020), New York Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave ruled (among other rulings) that a subset of documents (the “Guernsey Manager Documents”) “shall be excluded from the TAR review and shall be manually reviewed and produced” and also ruled that “Phase II discovery shall include: (a) a search of Barry John’s ESI but not the other six custodians; and (b) application of search terms to the Mimecast data, production of a hit report, and a meet-and-confer among the parties as to whether any responsive data shall be produced and if so, on what timeline.”
Case Background
This was a breach of contract, fraud and intentional misrepresentation case where the plaintiff alleged that the defendants “engaged in a pattern of fraudulent conduct aimed at undermining the negotiation of a contract to sell a portfolio of life insurance policies to Coventry.”
