Gucci America, Inc. v. Frontline Processing Corporation et al

Filing 47

ORDER: Presently before this court is a motion by plaintiff Gucci America, Inc. ("Plaintiff' or "Gucci") to sanction defendant Durango Merchant Services LLC ("Defendant" or "Durango") as a consequence of allegations charging spoliation of evidence; Based on the above, I must conclude that Durango's destroyed potentially relevant documents in violation of its duty to preserve, and as such, it is hereby ORDERED, that Durango shall not run any further "file-scrubbing"-type software on any computers that may contain documents or data relevant to this litigation, nor otherwise delete or destroy documents that could be relevant to this litigation; and it is further, ORDERED, that Durango allow Gucci to have a forensic expert "image" the hard drives of computers owned by William Dimopolis and Nathan Counley, and provide the imaged drives to Plaintiff. Durango shall pay the costs for the imaging and reconstruction process. The parties are instructed to confer and establish a proper method to exclude privileged documents (i.e. a privilege log) in this process or before the imaged drives are turned over to Gucci. If Gucci believes it needs to image any other computer hard drives controlled by Durango, it will file a letter brief with this court that explains why it seeks to do so; and it is further, ORDERED, that should new information come to light or if Plaintiff feel that further sanctions are necessary, it will make this request in its dispositive motion papers, should any be filed. (Signed by Judge Harold Baer on 7/2/10) (ae)