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Editor Bio
Gregg Mayer is a journalist and lawyer with a keen interest in the rapidly evolving world of e-Discovery. Gregg has published numerous articles, including writing for law journals and the American Bar Association. Gregg served as editor-in-chief of the Mississippi Law Journal. Before practicing law, Gregg worked as a newspaper reporter for six years.
Best Buy Off The Hook – This Time
Posted by Gregg Mayer on Monday, February 11th, 2008
Best Buy Stores recently stared down the barrel of having to pay more than $120,000 to restore back-up tapes of electronically stored information in a lawsuit that Best Buy had instigated. The district court in Minnesota, however, ruled the tapes are not reasonably accessible and Best Buy won’t have to dig them up unless the other side can show “good cause.”
As background, Best Buy brought a lawsuit against several landlords for a variety of reasons, including breach of contract and fraud.
Separately, in another lawsuit, Best Buy had prepared a database – called the Odom database – of ESI. Subsequently, Best Buy “downgraded” that database while the separate lawsuit against the landlords was pending.
The landlords said there was relevant ESI on the Odom database and Best Buy should have to restore it for the current litigation. Best Buy said it would cost $124,000, plus a monthly storage fee, to restore it. Best Buy’s lawsuit seeks about $800,000 in damages (although that could be enhanced).
The court agreed that Best Buy did not have to preserve the Odom database for the lawsuit against the landlords. Although the database would have had relevant information, the court explained:
The database, however, would have been potentially relevant to virtually any litigation involving Best Buy because of the quantity and nature of the information it contained. Absent specific discovery requests or additional facts suggesting that the database was of particular relevance to this litigation, the court determines that Best Buy did not have an obligation to maintain the Odom database at a monthly cost of over $27,000. Moreover, by downgrading the database, Best Buy did not destroy the information it contained but rather removed it from a searchable format. Therefore, Best Buy did not have a duty to preserve the Odom database as of July 27, 2006, and it need not restore the information to searchable format unless defendants establish good cause.
In other words, the information on the Odom database was likely available from other Best Buy sources and the cost to restore the Odom database was disproportionate to the value of doing it. The landlords needed more “particularlized arguments” – and a showing of “good cause” – before forcing Best Buy to restore the Odom database.
Of course, this case could have gone the other way too. After all, Best Buy admits the ESI was relevant to the case at hand, and although $124,000 is a lot of money, it is conceivably not overly prohibitive for a company the size of Best Buy to pay it.
Read a discussion about the case and the other Odom case too.
Posted in: Reasonably Accessible Information
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