In the wake of Judge Shira Scheindlin’s 2010 landmark decision in Pension Committee of the University of Montreal Pension Plan v. Banc of America Securities, defining the extent of the duty to preserve potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI) for e-discovery has been a hot issue for the courts.
In Pension Committee, Judge Scheindlin, of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, found that the plaintiffs’ failure to implement a legal hold on their ESI constituted gross negligence. The judge ordered further discovery,monetary sanctions and an adverse inference instruction to the jury.
