The Court has withdrawn this opinion. "The Opinion Previously Reported at this Citation has been Removed from the Lexis Service at the Request of the Court June 21, 2011."
In the seminal decision of Nat'l Day Laborer Org. Network v. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agency, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11655 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 7, 2011) the Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin set forth an extensive analysis requiring metadata accompany disclosure of federal ESI in a FOIA case.
Click Here (located at the bottom of the page) for a copy of the opinion issued on 2-7-11.
In this important decision, the Court found that, if requested, specific fields of metadata must accompany a federal FOIA request. In another "wake-up" call the Court chastised litigants for failure to cooperate in discovery. Interestingly, the Court included law professors in her critique and stated:
While certainly not rising to the level of a breach of an ethical obligation, such conduct certainly shows that all lawyers - even highly respected private lawyers, Government lawyers, and professors of law - need to make greater efforts to comply with the expectations that courts now demand of counsel with respect to expensive and time-consuming document production (emphasis added).
In this case, the Court:
- Reiterated the dispute resolution procedures contained in Rule 34 if the parties have a disagreement regarding the form of production
- Noted that Sedona Conference "abandoned an earlier presumption against the production of metadata"
- Extensively discussed what a "load" file is and the metadata that must be included in the file, and set out the specific metadata fields for e-mail and images
- If a party wrongfully discloses the improper ESI "form," the disclosing party must pay for redisclosure
- A party must not downgrade the "searchability" of ESI
Comments