The production of electronically stored information (ESI) in native file format continues to be a topic of interest for litigators. For those (and there are many) still confused, help may be on the way. Several recent decisions indicate that a consistent body of guidance is developing in the case law on this topic.
For the uninitiated, a document’s “native format” is the “default format of a file.”1 Files in their native format are usually read using the software program originally used to create them, as opposed to a generic reader, such as Adobe Acrobat, that is used to access files once they have been converted from their native format into another form, such as PDF files.2
