Tag:Taxable Costs

Key Insight: Observing that courts in the district have found that fees for “.TIFF and OCR conversion, Bates stamping, load file and other physical media generation” are recoverable as copying fees under Section 1920(4), but that costs of assembling, collecting, processing, storing or managing ESI are not recoverable, court reduced $61,549 award of taxable costs where prevailing party failed to provide sufficient detail of its e-discovery costs to allow the court to determine what items were properly taxable; court instead awarded costs of $6,870 which represented a charge of $0.03 per document for bates stamping and TIFF conversion of 229,000 documents

Nature of Case: Copyright infringement, unfair competition

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Court overruled plaintiffs? objection to clerk?s ruling on defendant?s bill of costs to the extent it awarded defendant taxable costs associated with retrieving computer information, noting that defendant sought reimbursement of only the costs incurred in the extraction endeavor — not for help in reviewing the documents; finding the request reasonable, the court observed: “Plaintiffs asked Defendant for 20 years of information from defendant?s mine site in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. Given the nature of the information storage over this period of time, it was reasonable, if not essential, for defendant to employ an expert third-party forensic expert to extract the information.?

Nature of Case: Environmental damage to the Flambeau River

Electronic Data Involved: 20 years of information

Key Insight: After granting summary judgment to defendants, court evaluated defendants’ bills of costs under Race Tires Am., Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp., 674 F.3d 158 (3d Cir. 2012) and sustained plaintiffs’ objections to several categories of defendants’ claimed e-discovery expenses because they did not constitute the cost of “making copies” under Section 1920(4), but were preparatory steps that occurred prior to copying or occurred after copying, e.g., electronic data “processing” expenses, “quality check” expenses, OCR costs, ?tech time,? ?data capture,? ?master CD replication,? costs associated with processing or creation of a “load file,” or cost of software packages used in production process; costs of converting native files to TIFF were recoverable

Nature of Case: Plaintiffs unsuccessfully claimed price-fixing among providers of text messaging services

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

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 followed prevailing view, adopted by the Third and Fourth Circuits, that Section 1920(4) has an exceedingly narrow scope as it relates to electronic production, and tasks and associated costs of electronic discovery other than file conversion – including “preserving, processing, searching, culling and extracting ESI” – do not amount to “making copies” under the statute; court evaluated expenses charged by defendants’ counsel’s in-house electronic discovery team and defendants’ outside e-discovery vendor, disallowing various e-discovery costs and applying a 90% across-the-board reduction to account for excluded tasks and vagueness in the billing entries submitted by defendants

Nature of Case: Musician sued producers and distributors of movie and its accompanying soundtrack for trademark infringement

Electronic Data Involved: ESI; costs associated with electronic discovery

Key Insight: Magistrate judge evaluated defendants’ bills of taxable costs and plaintiff’s objections thereto, and allowed and disallowed various e-discovery related costs; magistrate judge observed that courts within the Northern District of California have awarded costs under 28 USC s. 1920(4) for such things as scanning paper documents, electronic scanning and conversion to PDF, TIFF conversion, OCR and OCR conversion, image endorsement/Bates stamping, slip sheet preparation, blow-back scanning paper documents, and media hardware used for production; she further awarded costs related to the loading and processing of data, designed to make the data usable, actual data production costs, and migration and restoration costs designed to move the data — already stored in another database — into another database for use in the litigation; magistrate judge further ruled that e-discovery hosting costs and associated fees and FedEx costs associated with e-discovery costs were not compensable

Nature of Case: Patent infringement

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Court denied recovery of the cost of ?storage of produced documents in [an] electronic discovery database? where Plaintiff failed to establish that the database was necessary and not merely beneficial or convenient

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Key Insight: Acknowledging that the Eight Circuit has not yet addressed how section 1920(4) relates to electronically stored information, the court noted the persuasive reasoning in Race Tires America, Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp., 674 F.3d 158 (3d Cir. 2012) which held that ?scanning documents and converting computer data into readable format constitute copying within the meaning of section 1920(4)? and found the amounts sought by Plaintiff to be reasonable

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable electronic discovery costs

Key Insight: Where defendant sought ?the cost of file conversion, Bates labeling, and storing electronic documents produced during litigation,? the clerk taxed only the ?cost of TIFF conversion . . . and the costs of making copies of original dvd?s and the original CD?

Nature of Case: Patent infringement

Electronic Data Involved: ESI Taxable costs