Tag:Taxable Costs

Key Insight: Addressing Defendant?s request for $16,200.00 in costs charged by third party vendor who assisted in email production, including $16,000 for ?Digital Tech Time per GB: Tiff Conversion, OCR, Endorse & Export for Searchable PDF,? court concluded that converting files to TIFF or PDF was the equivalent of ?making copies? and was recoverable but that costs for making a document searchable are not recoverable; where Defendant failed to provide an adequate breakdown of the costs for each service provided, court reduced the requested recovery and awarded $4,000 for the ?Tiff conversion portion of the invoice? and also awarded $200 for the cost of two hard drives utilized for the email production

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs ( 28 U.S.C. ? 1920(4))

Key Insight: Court declined to allow recovery for ?electronic discovery vendor fees? because they are ?outside the scope of Section 1920? (28 U.S.C. 1920)

Nature of Case: Copyright infringement

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable Costs

Key Insight: Plaintiffs brought a ?Motion to Review Clerk?s Taxing of Costs Under F.R.C.P. 54(D)(1).? Specifically, Plaintiffs sought review of the clerk?s determination ?concerning the costs taxed amount of $55,649.98, which accounts for Defendants contracting with a private consulting company, Cyopsis, to retrieve and convert ESI into a retrievable format to produce information requested by Plaintiffs.? The court held that ?[b]ecause Defendants? costs related to the electronically stored information (?ESI?) are expenses enumerated in 28 U.S.C. ? 1920(4), and Plaintiffs were aware that Defendants would have to retain an outside consultant to retrieve and convert the ESI into a retrievable format, Plaintiffs? Motion is denied.?

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Court allowed taxable costs for ?the scanning and conversion of documents into TIFF format? noting that the conversion was ?critical due to the complex nature of the case and the sheer volume of documents that were exchanged during discovery and trial? and citing Race Tires Am., Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp., 674 F.3d 158, 160, 171 (3d Cir.2012)

Nature of Case: Consolidated claims under Hatch-Waxman Act

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable Costs

Key Insight: Court found Defendants were entitled to costs, including costs related to scanning, OCR bates labeling, and TIFF/PDF conversion but not costs associated with document collection, password recovery, searching, data hosting/electronic storage services and the fee for an e-discovery specialist

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Key Insight: Court approved taxation of costs related to TIFF conversion and ?uploading responsive documents through the use of a File Transfer Protocol,? but declined to allow costs related to ?Processing Initial Dataset,? ?Culling and Posting Resulting Data Subset,? ?Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Processing,? ?ID/Conversion of Non-searchable Docs to Searchable,? ?Project Management,? ?Hosting Active-Data,? and ?document unitization?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable e-Discovery costs

Key Insight: Regarding the taxation of e-Discovery costs, court found that costs ?associated with the conversion of ESI into a readable format, such as scanning or otherwise converting a paper version to an electronic version or converting native files to TIFF files … are compensable under ? 1920(4). But costs related to the ?gathering, preserving, processing, searching, culling, and extracting of ESI simply do not amount to ?making copies? and are thus not taxable.?

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable e-Discovery Cost

Key Insight: Cost of converting native email and other native files into imaged format for purposes of production was one of many items considered by the court in defendant?s application for costs following grant of summary judgment. Despite plaintiffs argument that the requested expenses should only be approved if they pertain to documents actually produced to Plaintiff, court was satisfied with defendant?s explanation that the costs were ?actually and necessarily incurred in responding to the Plaintiff?s discovery demands? and allowed recovery of defendant?s tiffing costs, even though Defendant could not ?state with certainty whether every document that was converted was actually turned over to Plaintiff as being responsive to a particular demand.?

Nature of Case: Breach of contract

Electronic Data Involved: Imaged native files

Key Insight: District Judge adopted in toto recommendations of the Magistrate Judge, including approval of costs related to converting ESI into a reasonable format, where the conversion was requested by an opposing party and ultimately ordered by the court

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Costs generically described as ?discovery services? and broken down as ?Active Hosting,? ?Nearline Hosting,? and ?User Access Fee? were denied where the generic descriptions were insufficient to meet the standard for specificity in the Ninth Circuit and where the descriptions failed to indicate that the fees were incurred for making copies

Electronic Data Involved: ESI (Taxable costs under 1920(4))