On February 16, 2012, President Barack Obama nominated Grimm to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland.[4] He would replace Judge Benson Everett Legg who has announced that he is taking senior status effective June 8, 2012. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on his nomination on May 9, 2012, and reported his nomination to the floor on June 7, 2012. The Senate confirmed his nomination on December 3, 2012, by a 92–1 vote, with Senator Roy Blunt casting the sole no vote.[5] He received his commission on December 6, 2012. He assumed senior status on December 11, 2022. Grimm retired from active service on December 30, 2022.[1]
Maryland Leadership in Law Award, Daily Record (2004)
Notable cases
Grimm's rulings on cases in which electronic discovery concerns were involved have advanced understanding of issues related to electronically stored information (ESI) in civil matters.[7]
Hopson v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore (2005).[8] In this widely cited 2005 opinion, Judge Grimm outlined a stop-gap formula that offered parties protection against the voluntary waiver of attorney–client privilege or attorney work product protections due to inadvertent production of ESI in the discovery process. In so doing, however, he highlighted the unmet need for a definitive legal rule that could provide more certain, uniform guidance on the waiver of those protections. Grimm's opinion in Hopson played a direct role in the subsequent enactment in 2008 of the new Federal Rule of Evidence (FRE) 502, which was designed to bring more certainty and uniformity to the law of voluntary waivers of the attorney–client privilege or work product protections in both federal and state courts. (When outlining the purposes of the new rule in the notes to FRE 502, the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules explicitly cited the Hopson opinion and Judge Grimm's concerns.[9])
Lorraine v. Markel (2007).[10][11] In a case regarding insurance coverage for a damaged boat, Judge Grimm wrote a 52-page opinion in which he articulated the evidentiary issues to be addressed in proving whether electronic data should be admitted into evidence at trial. A July 2008 article in the ABA Journal characterized Grimm as a "star" for breaking ground in a previously unaddressed aspect of evidentiary law.
In Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe Inc. (2008),[12] Judge Grimm found counsel had waived the attorney–client privilege as to a group of inadvertently produced documents because, inter alia, counsel failed to satisfactorily explain their review processes. He advised that counsel should be able to provide information regarding the search method used, reasons for its selection, the qualifications of the people who designed the search, the steps taken to assess reliability and appropriateness of the search method and the quality of its implementation. In his comments, Judge Grimm discussed indicia that a reasonable search had been performed, noting that the TREC Legal Track[broken anchor] project (a subgroup of the Text Retrieval Conference) would be a way to "…support an argument that the party employing them performed a reasonable ESI search…".
In Mancia v. Mayflower Textile Services Co. (2008),[13] a wage dispute, Grimm wrote a 30-page opinion which contains a detailed examination of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(g) (certification by counsel of discovery disclosures, requests, responses or objections, formed after reasonable inquiry) and an overview of the federal rules and other law that mandate cooperation among parties in discovery, dovetailing the views presented in the Sedona Conference Cooperation Proclamation. [improper synthesis?]
^ ab"Judge Paul W. Grimm". September 23, 2006. Archived from the original on September 23, 2006.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^"Lorraine v. Markel"(PDF). June 17, 2011. Archived from the original on June 17, 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
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