NEW YORK -- A federal magistrate judge on Sept. 5 ordered a woman to reimburse her former employer 30 percent of the costs it incurred from restoring and searching e-mails and hard drives of former employees for responsive documents (Claudia Quinby v. WestLB AG, No. 04 Civ. 7406, S.D. N.Y.).
U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry Pittman of the Southern District of New York used the seven-factor test established in Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC (216 F.R.D. 280 [S.D. N.Y.) to determine whether plaintiff Claudia Quinby should reimburse defendant WestLB AG for some of the $226,266.80 the company spent to restore backup tapes containing the e-mails of six former employees as well as the hard drives they shared.
The seven-factor test in Zubulake involves the marginal utility test, which examines the extent to which the request is specifically tailored to discover relevant information as well as the availability of such information from other sources, the total costs of production compared to the amount in controversy, the total costs of production compared to the resources available to each party, the relative ability of each party to control costs and its incentive to do so, the importance of the issues at stake in the litigation and the relative benefits to the parties of obtaining the information.
The magistrate judge concluded that the amount Quinby should contribute to the costs incurred by WestLB should be greater than those assessed in Zubulake because of the relatively small amount of responsive documents identified in the searches and because the search terms used in the present case were much broader than Zubulake.
Quinby is pursuing claims of gender discrimination in violation of Title VII against WestLB. Specifically, Quinby contends that similarly situated male workers were consistently given higher pay than female employees and that she was terminated because of her gender.
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