Courts Agree: eDiscovery Costs Make no Sense
Want to know why litigation is increasingly expensive and complicated? Take a look at eDiscovery costs. Thanks to a recent federal Appeals Court ruling, Vinter v. Gallo, we get a clear look under the hood to find out what parties are being charged for eDiscovery services in a fairly routine infringement suit. The original suit has been settled, but the defendant Gallo submitted a $111,047.75 bill for eDiscovery costs in the matter that included included:
• $71,910 for flattening and indexing ESI
• $15,660 for Searching/Review Set/Data Extraction
• $178.59 for Tiff Production and PDF Production
• $74.16 for electronic Bates Numbering
Post-trial wrangling over costs is an arcane and difficult area of law. But it doesn’t have to be. According to the existing federal law, parties can claim the costs of converting electronic files to non-editable formats, and transferring files onto CDs were taxable as “costs of making copies of any materials.” In other words, they can reclaim the cost of making copies, but not the cost of processing evidence.
Following the Third Circuit in Race Tires America, Inc. v. Hoosier Racing the district court said Gallo, “may not receive reimbursement for any other ESI-related expenses,” and found that, in this case, “the only tasks that involve[d] copying [we]re the conversion of native files to TIFF and PDF formats and the transfer of files onto CDs” and awarded only $218.59 in ESI-related costs. Read More >




However, that standard is shifting for the first time in a decade. The groundbreaking