The plaintiff, Country Vintner, had an agreement with a winery (Esmeralda, who was not named a party to the action) to be the exclusive wholesaler of Alamos, which is an Argentinean wine, in North Carolina. A few years later, the defendant, Gallo, started supplying the wine to a variety of other wholesalers, but not to Country Vintner. The plaintiff sued Gallo for violations of the North Carolina Wine Distribution Agreements Act and for violations of the N.C. Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Inevitably, there were disagreements over discovery of Electronically Stored Information (ESI). The plaintiff wanted emails and other ESI that would establish that there had been some sort of collusion between Esmeralda and Gallo that ended up excluding Country from the distribution of Alamos. The parties agreed to narrow the discovery request to certain key words, date restrictions, employees, etc., in order to accommodate Gallo’s complaints of an undue burden and expense to produce the requested information. After much deliberation, and accompanying motions, the district court decided to adopt Country’s proposal, ordering several search-narrowing guidelines. Gallo then collected more than 62 gigabytes of data and gave the data to their lawyers to process and review. The lawyers processed the data into a) searchable data, b) removed system files and exact duplicates, c) and ran several variations of the 19 proposed search terms and phrases. The district court eventually granted Gallo a motion to dismiss the complaint regarding the Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and also granted them summary judgment for the remaining Wine Act complaint. Then, perhaps getting a little ahead of itself, Gallo sought to recover $111,047.75 for their eDiscovery work. They broke down the costs as follows: $71,910.00 – for “flattening” and “indexing,” basically making the files searchable and removing duplicate content; $15,660.00 – for extracting the metadata, facilitating data review and other such things; $178.59 – for the conversion from native format to a .tif or .pdf format; $74.16 – for electronically Bates stamping the information; $40.00 – for copying the data onto a disc; $23,185.00 – for ensuring the “quality” of the data and ensure proper preparation of the documents for opposing counsel. The court granted a drastically reduced ESI-related recovery in the amount of $218.59. This covered the costs for copying or duplicating the files but not for their preparation or anything else. The court relied on a 2012 Third Circuit decision (Race Tires Am., Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp.) and interpreted the applicable statute (28 U.S.C. § 1920(4), a.k.a. the “taxation of costs” statute) to exclude ESI processing costs. When Gallo appealed this decision, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s decision. The court proceeded to go through the history of taxation of costs, which hadn’t existed prior to 1853, and has been slowly added to our law over the years. The latest version of section 1920 was amended in 2008, and allowed for fees for “printed or electronically recorded transcripts necessarily obtained for use in the case;” and “fees for exemplification and the costs of making copies of any materials where the copies are necessarily obtained for use in the case.” The court cited a Supreme Court decision that discussed the purpose of section 1920, and said that taxable costs should be a small fraction of the overall costs in litigation, and therefore should be interpreted narrowly to include only what is written in the law. Therefore, “making copies” was interpreted quite literally to include only the costs of actually making the copies, which in this case meant conversion to PDF and TIFF formats, and copying them onto a CD/DVD. Interestingly, the court also responded to the claim that the current e-technology requires more extensive preparation and therefore greater costs, by saying that preparation of discovery documents was always a big cost, yet were not authorized by Congress to be “taxable.” Gallo also tried to argue that when the statute provided for “exemplification” to be included in taxable costs, that it would include the costs in this case, since they had to load the information onto a review platform. The court said that exemplification does not apply here, since it means “an official transcript of a public record, authenticated as a true copy for use as evidence.” In our case, the charges didn’t include either any public records to be authenticated, or any exhibits. So the costs did not qualify as exemplification. What can be learned from this case is that although there are many things that go into the preparation of any type of discovery, including ESI, the costs of that preparation are not always carried by the requesting party. Undoubtedly, the charges that the defendant was trying to tax onto the plaintiff were legitimate. However, the history of the taxable charges laws has shown that the costs of production of discovery have been greatly limited to the copying stage, and not to the production. I would suggest, therefore, that before a party actually goes through the production and incurs its costs, perhaps they should include the costs into their discovery agreement. Akiva Shepard received his J.D. from Seton Hall University School of Law in 2014. Akiva has worked for a New York State Supreme Court Judge in Kings County and for a NJ real estate firm.
Phillips v. WellPoint, Inc., involved an application for costs by the prevailing defendant, WellPoint. Among the costs sought to be recovered by WellPoint were $83,642.83 for "the process of scanning hard copy documents so that they could be produced in electronic format" and for services “for the preparation of native electronic files and documents for production in electronic format.” WellPoint sought to recover these as costs of "making copies." Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d)(1) provides that “[u]nless a federal statute, these rules, or a court order provides otherwise, costs—other than attorney's fees—should be allowed to the prevailing party.” Those costs may include: (1) Fees of the clerk and marshal; (2) Fees for printed and electronically recorded transcripts necessarily obtained for use in the case; (3) Fees and disbursements for printing and witnesses; (4) Fees for exemplification and the costs of making copies of any materials where the copies are necessarily obtained for use in the case; (5) Docket fees under section 1923 of this title; (6) Compensation of court appointed experts, compensation of interpreters, and salaries, fees, expenses, and costs of special interpretation services under section 1828 of this title. 28 U.S.C. § 1920 (emphasis added). In evaluating the extent to which costs associated with producing electronically stored information ("ESI") are recoverable, the court, with no in circuit precedent on point, analyzed and ultimately adopted the Third Circuit's reasoning from Race Tires America, Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp., 674 F.3d 158 (3d Cir. 2012). In Race Tires, the Third Circuit found that the scanning of hard copy documents and the conversion of native files to TIFF were costs recoverable within the statutory meaning of “making copies.” However, the Third Circuit further found that although “extensive ‘processing’” may be “essential to make a comprehensive and intelligible production” of ESI, not all costs of producing ESI—such as the preliminary steps in the discovery process, such as locating documents, travelling to the location of the documents, or screening potentially relevant documents for privilege—are recoverable. Applying these principles, the court found the majority of costs sought by WellPoint to be non-recoverable. Only costs for imaging of hard copy files and conversion of documents into single TIFF images were recoverable. Conversely, the following costs were not recoverable: the extraction of document text; the process of rehabilitating documents in which the metadata fields and document text were damaged; applying bates stamp numbers; creating an image load file; creating a concordance-ready data load file; working with the clients in establishing production requirements; conducting quality control. The result was WellPoint only recovered $26,711.00 of the $83,642.83 sought. Adam L. Peterson is a student Seton Hall University School of Law, Class of 2014 graudate. At Seton Hall, Adam was a member of the Seton Hall Law Review and prior to law school Adam was an Environmental Analyst with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
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