It is not very often a Federal Judge will subtitle her written order. Judge Shira Scheindlin in Pension Comm. of Univ. of Montreal Pension Plan v. Banc of America Sec., LLC, 2010 WL 184312 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 15, 2010) rightly subtitled her order granting sanctions: “Zubulake Revisited: Six Years Later.” Zubulake, a case with a series of 5 written opinions – the last of which was decided in July of 2004 – were the seminal decisions in e-discovery that are widely cited authority in discovery disputes. Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC (“Zubulake V”), 229 F.R.D. 422 (S.D.N.Y. 2004).
The Zubulake series helped inform the 2006 Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure relating to electronically stored information (known as ESI to e-discovery practitioners or “data” to the rest of the world). Because of Zubulake, e-discovery practitioners have had a watchful eye on Judge Scheindlin ever since. More...