Court Orders Party to Explain How Documents Produced in Digital Format Were Ordinarily Maintained
Pass & Seymour, Inc. v. Hubbell Inc., 2008 WL 4240490 (N.D.N.Y. Sept. 12, 2008)
In this patent infringement case, the court addressed the issue of whether, in response to 72 separate document requests, the plaintiff’s production in digital format of 405,367 pages of documents, apportioned among 202 unlabeled folders and which through application of litigation support software could be made text searchable, but was otherwise neither organized to correlate to the document demands nor in any fashion indexed or labeled to reflect how they were maintained in the ordinary course of plaintiff’s business, satisfied the responding party’s obligations under Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Plaintiff asserted that, pursuant to FRCP 34, it had produced the documents in the manner in which they were maintained in the ordinary course of business and therefore need not indicate to which request the documents were responsive. In support of its position, plaintiff offered only the statement of an attorney indicating that the documents had been assembled as they had been maintained.