In Kyko Global, Inc. v. Prithvi Info. Solutions, Ltd., (Wd. Wash. June 13, 2014), plaintiff’s attorneys in a civil fraud suit bought a computer that had been seized from one of the defendants. The defendants figured it to and moved to disqualify the firm. The court denied the motion because the plaintiff’s lawyers had done nothing wrong., even though they went digging for meta-data mining on the hard drive.
Interestingly, the court held that privilege had not been waived by the plaintiff because he had believed that he had adequately erased the hard drive.
Lots of lessons. I remember being told the military burns computer hard drives because they can’t be truly “erased.”