The decisions that govern digital evidence

95 F.4th 730 (9th Cir. 2024)

The Ninth Circuit affirmed outright dismissal of a Title VII case after forensic examination showed the plaintiff deleted text messages and coordinated with witnesses to delete theirs. Under Rule 37(e)(2), intent to deprive — provable by circumstantial evidence — authorizes dismissal without a separate prejudice finding.

84 F.4th 304 (5th Cir. 2023)

In a trade-secret case over reservoir-simulation software, the Fifth Circuit affirmed a default judgment against a defendant who deleted data from his source-code control system days after court orders required its unmodified production. Forensic images surfaced later did not undo the sanction.

880 F.3d 620 (2d Cir. 2018)

The Second Circuit affirmed a $2.7 million monetary sanction against a discovery-evading defendant — full compensation for the corrective efforts its misconduct forced, including an independent forensic examination. Proportionality is measured against the costs the misconduct inflicted, not the amount in controversy.

229 F.R.D. 422 (S.D.N.Y. 2004)

Zubulake V made preservation counsel's problem, not just the client's. After UBS employees deleted emails despite a litigation hold, the court held that lawyers must actively monitor compliance — locating sources of discoverable information, not merely announcing the hold — and granted an adverse-inference instruction.

220 F.R.D. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 2003)

Zubulake IV is where the modern litigation hold comes from. The court held that once a party reasonably anticipates litigation, it must suspend routine document destruction and preserve relevant evidence — and that the duty can attach months before any complaint is filed.

241 F.R.D. 534 (D. Md. 2007)

Lorraine v. Markel is the opinion courts and litigators still reach for on ESI admissibility. After both sides attached unauthenticated emails to summary-judgment motions, Judge Grimm denied the motions and wrote the framework: relevance, authentication, hearsay, original-writing, and unfair prejudice, applied to electronic evidence.

526 U.S. 137 (1999)

Kumho Tire closed the loophole left after Daubert: the trial judge's gatekeeping obligation applies to all expert testimony — technical and other specialized knowledge included, not just science. A digital forensics examiner's methods face the same reliability scrutiny as a toxicologist's.

509 U.S. 579 (1993)

Daubert displaced the old 'general acceptance' test and made the trial judge the gatekeeper of expert testimony under Rule 702. Scientific evidence must be not only relevant but reliable — assessed through testability, peer review, error rates, controlling standards, and acceptance in the field.

585 U.S. 296 (2018)

The Supreme Court held that acquiring historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier is a Fourth Amendment search, refusing to extend the third-party doctrine to a comprehensive record of a person's movements. The government generally needs a warrant, not a subpoena, for this data.

134 S. Ct. 2473 (2014)

A unanimous Supreme Court held that police may not search the digital contents of a cell phone seized incident to arrest without a warrant. The Court's reasoning — that a phone's storage differs from physical items in both quantity and kind — now frames how every tribunal thinks about device data.

593 U.S. 374 (2021)

The Supreme Court narrowed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: a person 'exceeds authorized access' only by reaching files, folders, or databases that are off-limits to them — not by misusing access they legitimately have. Insider data-theft cases now turn on access architecture and other statutes.

621 F.3d 1162 (9th Cir. 2010)

Investigating ten baseball players, federal agents seized drug-test records for hundreds. The en banc Ninth Circuit affirmed orders returning and suppressing the overseized data, warning that segregating seizable electronic data must not become the government's route to data it lacked probable cause to collect.