Tag:Taxable Costs

Key Insight: Court overruled plaintiffs? objection to clerk?s ruling on defendant?s bill of costs to the extent it awarded defendant taxable costs associated with retrieving computer information, noting that defendant sought reimbursement of only the costs incurred in the extraction endeavor — not for help in reviewing the documents; finding the request reasonable, the court observed: “Plaintiffs asked Defendant for 20 years of information from defendant?s mine site in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. Given the nature of the information storage over this period of time, it was reasonable, if not essential, for defendant to employ an expert third-party forensic expert to extract the information.?

Nature of Case: Environmental damage to the Flambeau River

Electronic Data Involved: 20 years of information

Key Insight: After granting summary judgment to defendants, court evaluated defendants’ bills of costs under Race Tires Am., Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp., 674 F.3d 158 (3d Cir. 2012) and sustained plaintiffs’ objections to several categories of defendants’ claimed e-discovery expenses because they did not constitute the cost of “making copies” under Section 1920(4), but were preparatory steps that occurred prior to copying or occurred after copying, e.g., electronic data “processing” expenses, “quality check” expenses, OCR costs, ?tech time,? ?data capture,? ?master CD replication,? costs associated with processing or creation of a “load file,” or cost of software packages used in production process; costs of converting native files to TIFF were recoverable

Nature of Case: Plaintiffs unsuccessfully claimed price-fixing among providers of text messaging services

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Defendant moved for the court to tax costs for e-Discovery tasks including TIFF conversion, native file processing, CD creation, blowbacks and ?Data reduction & filtering? that the clerk had disallowed. The court disallowed costs for data reduction/filtering, native file processing and ?technical time? and allowed costs for Tiff conversion, CD/DVD creation, imaging and blowbacks (costs were reasonable and necessary).

Nature of Case: Taxable costs

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Court followed prevailing view, adopted by the Third and Fourth Circuits, that Section 1920(4) has an exceedingly narrow scope as it relates to electronic production, and tasks and associated costs of electronic discovery other than file conversion – including “preserving, processing, searching, culling and extracting ESI” – do not amount to “making copies” under the statute; court evaluated expenses charged by defendants’ counsel’s in-house electronic discovery team and defendants’ outside e-discovery vendor, disallowing various e-discovery costs and applying a 90% across-the-board reduction to account for excluded tasks and vagueness in the billing entries submitted by defendants

Nature of Case: Musician sued producers and distributors of movie and its accompanying soundtrack for trademark infringement

Electronic Data Involved: ESI; costs associated with electronic discovery

Key Insight: Magistrate judge evaluated defendants’ bills of taxable costs and plaintiff’s objections thereto, and allowed and disallowed various e-discovery related costs; magistrate judge observed that courts within the Northern District of California have awarded costs under 28 USC s. 1920(4) for such things as scanning paper documents, electronic scanning and conversion to PDF, TIFF conversion, OCR and OCR conversion, image endorsement/Bates stamping, slip sheet preparation, blow-back scanning paper documents, and media hardware used for production; she further awarded costs related to the loading and processing of data, designed to make the data usable, actual data production costs, and migration and restoration costs designed to move the data — already stored in another database — into another database for use in the litigation; magistrate judge further ruled that e-discovery hosting costs and associated fees and FedEx costs associated with e-discovery costs were not compensable

Nature of Case: Patent infringement

Electronic Data Involved: ESI

Key Insight: Court denied recovery of the cost of ?storage of produced documents in [an] electronic discovery database? where Plaintiff failed to establish that the database was necessary and not merely beneficial or convenient

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Key Insight: Reducing defendants taxable costs, the court indicated that recovery for bates labeling, converting to pdf for attorney review and redaction, and de-duplication was not allowed and significantly reduced the remaining identified costs, including those for ?processing? and ?preparing? data absent a sufficient explanation of what was meant by those terms

Electronic Data Involved: Taxable costs

Key Insight: Court approved recovery of costs related to making one set of copies of the at issue documents, including bates labeling , but found that the city had ?not met its burden of establishing that the additional expenses, including scanning, OCR, and the production of a master DVD, were reasonably necessary under ? 1920(4)?

Nature of Case: Unlawful retaliation under Title VII

Electronic Data Involved: taxable costs

Key Insight: Noting that ?[t]he Lanham Act and the Copyright Act allow recovery of reasonable costs that are otherwise non-taxable under 28 U.S.C. ? 1920? and that Defendant?s claimed e-discovery costs were reasonable, the court reasoned that ?[c]ourts have found e-discovery costs reasonable and recoverable if they were ?not accrued merely for the convenience of counsel,?? that the claimed costs ?were mainly accrued in response to [Plaintiff?s] discovery requests (e.g. the majority of the costs are for converting materials into the agreed upon .tiff format),? and that Plaintiff had not ?identified any costs that [were] ?merely for the convenience of counsel?? and thus found that Defendant?s e-discovery costs were recoverable

Nature of Case: Trade dress and copyright infringement

Electronic Data Involved: taxable costs