Last September Master McLeod of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice issued an e-discovery order that was just brought to my attention and that makes some points about the discovery of a hard drive.
The order involves an external hard drive that a departed employee (and defendant) admitted contained his former employer’s (and plaintiff’s) information and turned over to plaintiff counsel for “forensic review.” Plaintiff counsel did not use a forensic IT specialist to review the drive. It reviewed the drive itself and segregated a number of potentially privileged files. It also discovered over 400 zip files that contained backups of information from the defendant’s personal laptop.
Master McLeod held that the defendant should review the files that plaintiff counsel had segregated as potentially privileged. In doing so, he commented that there was an honest misunderstanding about the meaning of “forensic review” and that plaintiff counsel took adequate steps to protect itself from exposure to privileged communications. Nonetheless, according to Master McLeod “conducting the document review in house without specific agreement or disclosure was less than prudent.”
Master McLeod also held that the plaintiff could continue to review the 400 plus zip files through its forensic expert. He said:
In my view this kind of analysis is best conducted by an arm’s length expert for two reasons. The first is that the data ostensibly belongs to the opposing party and will contain irrelevant confidential information (as anticipated) and apparently privileged information (which does not appear to have been anticipated by the defendant at least). The second reason is that the personnel conducting the analysis may have to be witnesses at trial and that militates against the use of in house I.T. or paralegal staff.
Notably, Master McLeod rejected a defendant argument that the zip files should not be reviewed at all based on a statement in the Sedona Canada Principles that indicates recourse to backup files should not ordinarily be within the scope of production. He held that, In the circumstances, the backup files were a potentially critical source of evidence that the plaintiff was prepared to review. The plaintiff would bear the cost of the review subject to cost recovery at the end of the day.
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