Federal Judge Sanctions Tech Company Over Handling of E-Discovery

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."

Pauley also awarded $150,000 in attorney's fees to the two plaintiffs, Dan Harkabi and Gidon Elazar, because of delays the company caused in producing their e-mails during the 17 months they worked for SanDisk.

In 2004, the plaintiffs sold a software company they had founded in Israel to SanDisk for $10 million up front. An additional $4 million was to be paid depending on the level of sales SanDisk realized over the next two years on products "derived" from technology developed by the Israeli company. As part of the deal, Harkabi and Elazar moved to New York and began working for SanDisk.

At the end of the two-year period, SanDisk contended the threshold for the Israeli software developers to claim their "earn-out" fee had not been met, and offered them $800,000. When the developers continued to demand the full $4 million, SanDisk ended their employment.

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Source: law.com
By: Daniel Wise