While the court appeared to take the traditional approach to costs, i.e., each side must bear its own, one ruling, made casually in a few sentences, is revolutionary: That if a producing party has taken steps to make it easier for them to access data for review, it must provide a requesting party with a copy of the data in that more accessible format, even though such is not required by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the producing party likely paid a great deal of money to make that data more accessible. It is highly possible that the court did not understand the significance of its ruling, but significant it is, as we shall see.
The issue of cost arose first when the court denied plaintiffs’ request for “all of the metadata associated with e-mails and [W]ord documents” produced by defendants, agreeing that the 12 unspecified metadata fields defendants agreed to produce were sufficient. The court reasoned that “[m]any courts have expressed reservations about the utility of metadata, explaining that it does not lead to admissible evidence and that it can waste parties’ time and money,” citing to Wyeth v. Impax Lab. Inc., 248 F.R.D. 169, 171 (D. Del. 2006) and Williams v. Sprint/United Mgmt. Co., 230 F.R.D. 640, 651 (D. Kan. 2005).
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