Availability of Clawback Order Thwarts Claim of Undue Burden Based on Cost to Review
In re Coventry Healthcare, Inc. ERISA Litig., No. AW 09-2661, 2013 WL 1187909 (D. Md. Mar. 21, 2013)
In this brief opinion, the court considered Defendants’ claim that the burden of producing the requested ESI outweighed its potential benefit to the class action plaintiffs and granted Plaintiffs’ motion to compel. Specifically, Defendants claimed that Plaintiffs’ search terms, as applied to the ESI of selected custodians from the relevant discovery time frame, “hit” on approximately 200,000 documents and that it would cost approximately $388,000 “to process host and review the data for responsiveness and privilege.” Defendants did not, however, suggest alternative measures to accommodate Plaintiffs’ discovery needs “other than negotiating more refined search terms.”