In ongoing employment dispute, Magistrate Michael Watanabe, sitting in the District of Colorado, noted that the 2006 Amendments “simply clarify that discovery of electronically stored information stands on equal footing with discovery of paper documents. Without a qualifying reason, plaintiff is no more entitled to access to defendant’s electronic information storage systems than to defendant’s warehouses storing paper documents. Like the other discovery rules, Rule 34 allows the responding party to search his records to produce the required, relevant data” and “does not give the requesting party the right to conduct the actual search.? The court went on to hold that, based on the evidentiary showing made, the plaintiff failed to meet her burden justifying the appointment of a third-party computer forensic expert to examine the defendant’s computer system. Finally, the court held that costs of restoring old back-up tapes, which “are not currently accessible by Defendant City of Colorado since they do not have the hardware to access them,” outweighs the possible yield of relevant and probative information. See Palgut v. City of Colorado Springs, No.06-01142, 2007 WL 4277564 (D.Colo. Dec. 3, 2007).
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