California Magistrate Issues Important ESI Ruling on Modern Attachments

An article by eDiscovery Today highlights an important ruling on modern attachments concerning electronically stored information (ESI) protocol by California Magistrate Judge Lisa J. Cisneros. In the case, In re Uber Techs., Inc. Passenger Sexual Assault Litig, Cisneros took a broad view of the term “attachments,” and accepted a modified version of the plaintiffs’ proposal that included “modern attachments” as part of the definition.

The litigation concerns allegations that Uber failed to implement appropriate safety precautions which led to alleged incidents of sexual assault or harassment of passengers. Cloud-stored documents issues related to Google Workspace, which Uber uses), metadata fields, and related provisions of ESI protocol had to be agreed upon. The parties met and submitted a Joint Discovery Letter regarding their disagreements, which the Court addressed.

Cisneros rejected the plaintiffs’ methodology based on sample scripts, proposed by their e-discovery expert, in part because the script would not work for Google Vault. She said the limitations of producing hyperlinked documents from Google Vault “have been widely known for many years, yet Uber has elected to transfer and retain its electronic data using this service.”

She ruled that with respect to cloud-stored documents, “Uber shall preserve the metadata relationship between email messages with links to files on Google Drive to the extent feasible with existing technology… the metadata exported from Google Vault pertaining to each document shall be preserved and produced as metadata for the same document within the load file of any production containing any such document.” She also said: The parties must make reasonable efforts to maintain and preserve the relationship between any message or email and any cloud-hosted document hyperlinked or referenced within it.

A key point of the ruling on modern attachments was her definition of “attachment.” She rejected Uber’s definition, which stated: “For the avoidance of doubt, a hyperlinked document, such as a cloud-based document in Google Drive, is not an ‘attachment.” She ruled that attachments include traditional email attachments and documents embedded in other documents as well as modern attachments, pointers, internal or non-public documents linked, hyperlinked, stubbed, or otherwise pointed to within or as part of other ESI.