District Court

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Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified in Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. v. Haeger that even a district court’s exercise of broad discretion to impose a civil sanction for a litigant’s bad faith conduct has to be limited by a causal link.

The parties in Goodyear had reached a settlement of the underlying product liability case after several years of contentious discovery. After the settlement, however, plaintiffs, the Haegers, learned (and Goodyear, the defendant, conceded) that Goodyear had withheld certain information that the Haegers had requested early and often during the discovery stage. Accordingly, the Haegers asked the District Court to impose sanctions on Goodyear for discovery fraud. Because the parties had already settled, the only sanction available was to award the Haegers attorney’s fees and costs expended in the litigation. 

dina-friday-1We’ve all been there. Your friends throw you in the pool with your phone in your pocket. You repeatedly slice your finger on shards of glass from your phone’s shattered screen. Or, maybe you forget your phone isn’t waterproof and dump champagne all over it. For most of us, the worst part of these ordeals is a trip to the Apple Store and the hefty price tag of the latest iPhone. However, if you’re a litigant with text messages that are relevant to pending litigation, the failure to preserve those messages could result in spoliation sanctions or an adverse inference instruction. While case law is unlikely to provide insight on what to do with a champagne-covered, non-waterproof phone, a recent district court decision, Shaffer v. Gaither, provides guidance to litigants on what steps to take to preserve potentially-relevant electronically-stored information (“ESI”) stored on mobile devices. 

The Second Circuit recently set aside a $147 million verdict against two Chinese companies accused of conspiring to fix the price and supply of vitamin C sold to U.S. buyers. In re Vitamin C Antitrust Litigation. The panel held that the complaint should have been dismissed after the Chinese government submitted an amicus curiae brief confirming that Chinese law required the companies to fix prices and, in effect, violate U.S. antitrust law. The panel found that the companies could not simultaneously comply with U.S. and Chinese law and, drawing on principles of international comity, vacated the district court judgment.

2015 and 2016 saw a wave of transactions among cable, satellite, and other linear programming distributors: AT&T & DirecTV, Altice and Suddenlink, etc. That transactional wave is beginning to spawn a litigation wave, principally over interpretation and application of the pre-existing licenses and contracts between networks and distributors. A recent ruling in one California case is noteworthy to the extent that it allowed a network to proceed against a distributor on multiple theories beyond the parties’ written contract.