"The court has already declined to issue terminating sanctions against Google"
"the Court would like to see the state of the evidence at the end of fact discovery"
You can see the dilemma in that last statement. There is practically no discovery malpractice large enough to ever have a judge blow up a case, which is why it happens over and over again.
It happens. The Feds changed the rules of civil procedure back in 2006-2008 to eliminate most excuses to produce information.
Prior to that, you could go the court and say your Exchange backup restorations would be difficult or impractical to do at reasonable cost and try to get the other party to pay or share cost. Now, the judge would laugh at you if you responded that way.
Google culturally has a small company mindset about this stuff, plus they are really rich so they can buy their way out of trouble. Now that HN people are talking about these issues, you can be sure some attorney or regulator will find a way to screw the company over good, as things like this are dumb.
You can already see that in his previous findings: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23731433-23-03-28-go...
"The court has already declined to issue terminating sanctions against Google"
"the Court would like to see the state of the evidence at the end of fact discovery"
You can see the dilemma in that last statement. There is practically no discovery malpractice large enough to ever have a judge blow up a case, which is why it happens over and over again.