Court Awards Defendants Nearly $500,000 in Taxable E-Discovery Costs

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A post on the e-Discovery Case Law Update blog of the law firm Littler, no specific author credit is provided.

This article discusses the case In In re Aspartame Antitrust Litigation [pdf], No. 2:06-CV-1732, 2011 (E.D. Penn. Oct. 5, 2011).  A link to the opinion is provided in the article.

The case discussed involved a situation where several of the defendants were granted summary judgement, and then sought recovery of costs, primarily eDiscovery related costs.  The article states, "...the court agreed with the defendants that electronic discovery saved a significant amount of costs overall by allowing discovery to be conducted in an efficient and cost effective manner. Accordingly, the court under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d) granted the defendants’ motion seeking the recovery of costs associated with the creation of a litigation database, storage of data, imaging hard drives, keyword searches, de-duplication, data extraction and processing, privilege screen (i.e., keywords for privileged documents), data hosting, technical support, project management, data recovery, tape restoration, and the production costs associated with the creation of load files that allowed documents saved as TIFFs to be loaded into review platforms."

The court however apparently refused to award the full amount of the costs, as they felt that some of the advanced functionality provided by the review platform in question was more of a "luxury" and this made the court reluctant to award costs for such services.

The article states, "In all, the court awarded the defendants more than $500,000 in taxable costs, the overwhelming majority of which dealt with electronic discovery."