The e-discovery process not only is growing more complicated, but non-compliance is becoming a lot more costly, especially if you fail to preserve relevant documents. In a recent case out of Texas, a court was so dismayed by a defending company's abuse of the process that it ordered the company to give the court opinion to everyone else who had filed a lawsuit against it in the previous two years, writes Ben Kerschberg in a post at Forbes. And that's not all: The company also had to give the court's opinion to everyone who it ends up in a lawsuit with over the next five years.

The case, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, involved Blitz U.S.A. Inc., a gas can manufacturer, which was sued by Rene Green, who said a defective can caused her husband's death. The court found that Blitz U.S.A. withheld corporate communications that would have been relevant to the case. The only reason the lawyer for Green knew about the communications is that he discovered them when he was representing someone else suing Blitz. 

"Blitz had what might generously be described as a unique way of conducting its discovery," writes Kerschberg. Just one employee at the company was in charge of searching for documents related to the lawsuit. He did not search for emails using word searches, and he didn't talk with the company's IT group about searching for electronic records.

What really got Blitz in trouble was not issuing a litigation hold to preserve records, and then encouraging the destruction of documents. Here is how the court saw it:

"From 2004 through 2007, Blitz's department head, Paul Hale, routinely sent emails to all Blitz employees instructing them and encouraging them to delete email...[T]here are at least ten emails in the record where Paul Hale requested that all employees at Blitz delete their emails," the court found. "During this precise time period, Blitz was actively defending multiple products liability lawsuits relating to its gas cans and had a duty to preserve evidence. Paul Hale admits that when he sent these multiple emails telling employees to delete their email, the employees were not told to retain email relevant to ongoing litigation."

The sanctions, which also included a $250,000 civil contempt payment to the plaintiff, may be considered severe by some, but they illustrate the seriousness with which courts are taking the e-discovery process.  

"Suffice it to say that judges take such behavior [as at Blitz] personally," Kerschberg writes. "They don't like when litigants waste the court's time, and they don't like to be taken for fools."

For more:
- see Ben Kerschberg's post at Forbes

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