Quinby v. Westlb Ag

245 F.R.D. 94 (S.D.N.Y. 2006)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

Over the course of her employment P noticed that women were treated differently than men. P and other women were “excluded from the office communications loop” and were not invited to business-related dinners and after-hours social activities. P's supervisor, Parker, and the other men in the group would often make offensive or demeaning comments and jokes about women and would sometimes announce that a client or colleague needed to be “bitch slapped.” P received lower pay than males on the sales desk. D made “secret bonus payments” to male members of her sales desk. P filed a formal grievance complaining of gender discrimination with human resources. The parties reached a settlement where P received a $250,000 “bonus” in exchange for releasing all claims against D for acts occurring prior to 2003. The discriminatory environment continued. D began planning a workforce reduction. P was told she would soon be terminated because her position was being eliminated. P alleges that at this same time, Parker was interviewing male candidates to fill P's position. When she was scheduled to talk about her termination package P was told not return to the office. Two other people on the sales desk also resigned at this time, leaving no senior salespeople. Sales desk personnel received their bonuses for fiscal year 2002. P did not receive a bonus. P filed a charge with the EEOC against D. In September 2003, P was fully reinstated to her former position at D. Two other senior salesmen were also hired at approximately this time, resulting in the sales desk having the same number of senior salespeople employed as before the workforce reduction. P's most lucrative account was assigned to a male employee who had not previously covered the account. By January 2004, Parker had criticized Ps performance. P was also told she would receive no bonus for 2003 because the bank had had a poor financial year. Every other employee in her department received a bonus, including the two new male employees. P filed an internal grievance in the human resources department, who dismissed the complaint. P filed an amended charge with the EEOC, claiming that D's failure to pay her a bonus was retaliatory. On April 16, 2004, P was terminated. P filed a second amended charge with the EEOC, claiming that her firing was retaliatory. P served discovery and D objected to many of the requests for electronic discovery claiming they were overly broad and would result in undue burden. D's data was on backup tapes is in an inaccessible, compressed format, and restoring the data to a readily-accessible format takes substantial amounts of time and results in significant expense. D stores its backups on tape drives with compressed data. Data stored on backup tapes becomes usable when fragmented data contained on the tapes is unfragmented and erased data is reconstructed. When an employee leaves, D deletes the employee's e-mails from its accessible database and maintains them solely on backup tapes. A good deal of the information P seeks is on these backup tapes. D retained an outside consultant, Kroll. Kroll was familiar with D's electronic systems and storage. He searched 171 backup tapes for 2003 and 2004 as well as hard drives shared among employees within the two departments that the Former Employees worked in. This process yielded 59,635 originals, i.e., non-duplicate, documents consisting of 401,420 pages. D produced only 9,622 documents, or 141,702 pages, from accessible sources. D got a bill for $181,013.28 to restore and search these backup tapes. Kroll also charged D a 25% premium for expediting the project or a total to $226,266.60.