By its own admission, the Texas Supreme Court has had “few occasions to enter the fray” of electronic discovery, but did so in the recent mandamus proceeding In re State Farm Lloyds, Relator. In this case, homeowners sued State Farm alleging underpayment of hail damage claims. Plaintiffs sought, and the trial court imposed, a requirement that electronically stored information be produced in native or “near-native” form rather than the “reasonably useable,” static image forms such as PDF, TIFF and JPEG into which State Farm regularly converted ESI.

In denying mandamus and allowing State Farm to seek reconsideration by the trial court, the Texas Supreme Court articulated a detailed proportionality analysis for determining the appropriate form of production in future disputes, aligning it with state and federal rules and case law.

Form of Production