Extract from Exterro’s “How to Determine When Forensic Imaging Should Be Used in E-Discovery”
The plaintiffs in this case asked the court to reconsider its prior ruling allowing some of the plaintiffs’ electronic devices to be forensically imaged.
There is no dispute that the plaintiffs had a duty to preserve information that was stored on the electronic devices in question. The plaintiffs admitted when the devices are in regular use, “information would be overwritten – i.e., information would not be preserved.” Since the plaintiffs did not want to stop using these electronic devices, the court’s initial ruling permitted the forensic imaging of “at least some devices” at no cost to the plaintiff.
Based on prior case law, the plaintiff argued the merits of reconsidering the original ruling on the basis that imaging should only be “employed in very limited set of circumstances” and shouldn’t apply imaging in a “broad nature,” which the court’s ruling violated in this case.
