Tag:Taxable Costs

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 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: 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: 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: 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 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: Noting the limited application of 28 U.S.C. ?1920(4), the court declined to allow recovery of electronic discovery costs for ?forensic consulting and collection,? ?early case assessment,? and ??electronic discovery processing and hosting, data collection, imaging,? and the like? because they were ?not associated with the copying of digital materials?

Nature of Case: Contract dispute

Electronic Data Involved: taxable costs for electronic discovery

Key Insight: Court declined to allow recovery of costs related to the copying and maintenance of emails within an electronic database where the party seeking recovery voluntarily assumed the costs to avoid the need to review voluminous hard copy and where the copies were not obtained ?for use in the case? as evidenced by the petitioner?s reliance on only a very small portion of ESI as exhibits in this case

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs related to storage of emails, ESI

Key Insight: Court awarded costs in favor of defendant, including costs related to electronic discovery: ?We have carefully considered Plaintiff’s objections to the nature of the costs sought to be recovered by Defendant, in particular, to the costs incurred in connection with the production of electronically stored information, but we do not find Plaintiff’s objections to be meritorious. As Defendant points out in its briefings, we have awarded as costs the expense of producing electronically stored information in several other recent cases, and Plaintiff’s objections are based largely on judicial decisions issued by courts in other districts and circuits, including the Eastern District of Missouri and the Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals, which are contrary to the rulings within our Seventh Circuit.?

Electronic Data Involved: ESI (taxable costs)