Pippins v. KPMG LLP

Kyle Pippins (plaintiff) filed a federal class-action lawsuit against his former employer, KPMG LLP (defendant), alleging that KPMG had violated various federal and state employment laws. The district court had not yet certified the class, which potentially consisted of 7,500 other former KPMG employees. Pippins sought to have the hard drive from each former employee’s KPMG-issued laptop preserved on the chance that the drives could contain useful evidence. KPMG moved for a protective order under Rule 26(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The requested order would have either permitted KPMG to discard all but 100 drives or, alternatively, to charge Pippins for the cost of retaining all 7,500 drives. KPMG argued that the cost of preserving all 7,500 drives was disproportionate to the potential benefit and that, at best, electronically stored information (ESI) on the drives was duplicative of ESI that KPMG had already preserved. KPMG refused Pippins’s requests to let Pippins sample the contents of five randomly selected drives or to let him depose KPMG employees to learn what the drives contained. A magistrate judge denied KPMG’s motion but stayed discovery, pending further orders of the court or an agreement between the parties as to an appropriate sampling methodology. KPMG renewed its Rule 26(c) motion as soon as the district court certified the class of plaintiffs.