Court Rejects Unilateral Decision to Apply Predictive Coding to Keyword Search Hits, Orders Production of All Hits Pursuant to Clawback Order as Stipulated
Progressive Cas. Ins. Co. v. Delaney, No. 2:11-cv-00678-LRH-PAL, 2014 WL 2112927 (D. Nev. May 20, 2014)
In this case, the parties agreed upon an e-discovery protocol which was memorialized in a court order. Shortly into its review, Plaintiff determined that the agreed-upon methodology (manual review of search term hits) would be too time consuming and expensive and decided that it would instead apply predictive coding to those documents identified by the agreed-upon search terms—which it began doing without consulting the requesting party or the court. The requesting party, FDIC-R (FDIC as Receiver), opposed Plaintiff’s unilateral action for several reasons, including the lack of transparency around the predictive coding methodology employed and that the predictive coding protocol did not comport with the recommended “best practices” for the chosen software program. Ultimately, despite expressing support for the use of predictive coding in discovery, the court ordered Plaintiff to produce all of the documents identified by the agreed-upon keywords, subject to a clawback order, where such a production had been memorialized as an acceptable option in the stipulated order and where Plaintiff had abandoned the option it originally selected (manual review). The court also noted the FDIC-R’s commitment to devoting the necessary resources to review the documents quickly and thus allow discovery—which had been “stalled for many months”—to move forward. Read More