Court Need Not Compel Hard Copy Production where More Reasonable Accommodation Available

Sattar v. Motorola, Inc., 138 F.3d 1164 (7th Cir. 1998)

Defendant produced email on four-inch magnetic tapes which plaintiff, lacking the necessary equipment and software, was unable to read. Plaintiff moved to compel the production of the email in hard copy form (some 210,000 pages).

The court denied the motion to compel, concluding that a more reasonable accommodation was some combination of downloading the data from the tapes to conventional computer disks or a hard drive, or loaning plaintiff a copy of the necessary software, or offering plaintiff on-site access to the system. If these options failed, the court indicated it would require the parties to share equally in the copying costs. Ultimately, the defendant provided plaintiff a hard drive onto which it transferred the requested email data.