Court Considers Zubulake Factors, Denies Defendant’s Motion to Shift Cost of OCR Processing
Proctor & Gamble Co. v. S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 2009 WL 440543 (E.D. Tex. Feb 19, 2009)
In this case, following the court’s decision that all documents were to be produced electronically in TIFF format with Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”), defendant asserted that the cost of processing the documents should be shifted to the plaintiff. In support of its assertion, defendant claimed that the cost of conversion to OCR would likely exceed $200,000 and that “it does not itself seek to use the OCR process, and any extra expense would be incurred on it behalf solely for Plaintiff’s convenience.” Defendant offered no evidence in support of its estimate, however, and the court’s own research indicated the estimated cost appeared to be “somewhat inflated.” Nor did defendant deny that the OCR process would make the documents easier to examine, thus reducing costs for attorney time.