Judge sets rules for e-mail retrieval
A federal judge has ordered financial firm UBS to pay most of the cost of restoring lost e-mail in a gender discrimination suit against it, but she did shift some of the burden to the plaintiff.
In a decision with wide-ranging ramifications for any company that keeps electronic records, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin outlined and applied a set of legal principles that judges and parties in a lawsuit must consider when deciding who should pay for electronic evidence retrieval. These include whether the information sought is relevant to the case and whether the costs of retrieving the documents would be too costly.
Based on those principles, she determined that UBS must pay 75 percent of the estimated costs of restoring the documents from backup tapes. She also ruled that UBS must pay the entire cost of "producing" them, which includes costs such as hiring a lawyer to review the restored documents for privileged information before releasing them. That brings the UBS share of the costs to about $232,000.
Laura Zubulake, a former UBS equities trader who is suing the company for gender discrimination, must pay 25 percent of the estimated cost of restoring the data from backup tapes, or about $41,488, according to court documents. Zubulake is seeking e-mails she said would prove that UBS employees failed to promote her and then terminated her because she's a woman.
Traditionally, the party that turns over the papers in a case pays the full cost of doing so, unless some other arrangement is made. However, the issue of electronic documents is complicated because, unlike paper records, they can be retrieved once deleted. Such recovery is often quite costly.
