Tag:Taxable Costs

Key Insight: Regarding the taxation of e-Discovery costs, court found that costs ?associated with the conversion of ESI into a readable format, such as scanning or otherwise converting a paper version to an electronic version or converting native files to TIFF files … are compensable under ? 1920(4). But costs related to the ?gathering, preserving, processing, searching, culling, and extracting of ESI simply do not amount to ?making copies? and are thus not taxable.?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable e-Discovery Cost

Key Insight: Court approved taxation of costs related to TIFF conversion and ?uploading responsive documents through the use of a File Transfer Protocol,? but declined to allow costs related to ?Processing Initial Dataset,? ?Culling and Posting Resulting Data Subset,? ?Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Processing,? ?ID/Conversion of Non-searchable Docs to Searchable,? ?Project Management,? ?Hosting Active-Data,? and ?document unitization?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable e-Discovery costs

Key Insight: Court held clerk did not err in awarding costs for ?loading documents into an electronic data base for production to Plaintiff on computer disks during discovery.?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Key Insight: Court found Defendants were entitled to costs, including costs related to scanning, OCR bates labeling, and TIFF/PDF conversion but not costs associated with document collection, password recovery, searching, data hosting/electronic storage services and the fee for an e-discovery specialist

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Key Insight: Court denied recovery of OCR costs where Defendant failed to show that the step was necessary for making copies, where no party had identified 5th Circuit authority allowing recovery of OCR costs, and where the holding was consistent with the Court?s standing order, which specifically instructed that e-Discovery costs were not allowed, including ?cost for document collection, document processing, and document hosting.?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Key Insight: Plaintiffs brought a ?Motion to Review Clerk?s Taxing of Costs Under F.R.C.P. 54(D)(1).? Specifically, Plaintiffs sought review of the clerk?s determination ?concerning the costs taxed amount of $55,649.98, which accounts for Defendants contracting with a private consulting company, Cyopsis, to retrieve and convert ESI into a retrievable format to produce information requested by Plaintiffs.? The court held that ?[b]ecause Defendants? costs related to the electronically stored information (?ESI?) are expenses enumerated in 28 U.S.C. ? 1920(4), and Plaintiffs were aware that Defendants would have to retain an outside consultant to retrieve and convert the ESI into a retrievable format, Plaintiffs? Motion is denied.?

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Reasoning that ?[t]he inquiry about what electronic processes are taxable turns on whether they are part of making copies ?necessarily obtained for use in the case? or instead are solely for the convenience of counsel? the court indicated that it would award costs for load file preparation, but not for processing data

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable Costs

Key Insight: Reducing defendants taxable costs, the court indicated that recovery for bates labeling, converting to pdf for attorney review and redaction, and de-duplication was not allowed and significantly reduced the remaining identified costs, including those for ?processing? and ?preparing? data absent a sufficient explanation of what was meant by those terms

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Key Insight: Defendant moved for the court to tax costs for e-Discovery tasks including TIFF conversion, native file processing, CD creation, blowbacks and ?Data reduction & filtering? that the clerk had disallowed. The court disallowed costs for data reduction/filtering, native file processing and ?technical time? and allowed costs for Tiff conversion, CD/DVD creation, imaging and blowbacks (costs were reasonable and necessary).

Nature of Case: Taxable costs

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Court denied request for costs of ?preparing electronic data to be converted to TIFF format? including ?data loading, data processing, and de-duplication and culling?; regarding OCR costs, the court acknowledged that there is ?less uniformity? about the issue of recovery and awarded costs for converting ESI into a ?readable format? (TIFF Conversion) – the equivalent of ?making copies? under 1920(4) – but denied costs for making that document searchable (OCR), noting that the requesting party had not ?shown why OCR was necessary to the production?

Electronic Data Involved: ESI Taxable costs