A federal judge has sanctioned a leading developer of “flash drive” technology for its mishandling of electronic discovery in what the judge called a “David and Goliath-like” struggle.
Southern District Judge William H. Pauley ruled that he would instruct the jury to draw a negative inference from the fact that SanDisk Corp., a company with a market capitalization of $8.7 billion, had lost the hard drives from laptop computers it issued to two former employees who are the plaintiffs in Harkabi v. Sandisk Corp., 08 Civ. 8230.
SanDisk must be “mortif[ied]” by the ex-employees’ argument that the company, as a leading purveyor of electronic data storage devices, cannot claim that it made an “innocent” mistake in losing the hard-drive data, Pauley wrote.
That argument is on target, the judge concluded, noting that SanDisk’s “size and cutting edge technology raises an expectation of competence in maintaining its own electronic records.”
via Law.com – Federal Judge Sanctions Tech Company Over Handling of E-Discovery.
