E-Discovery Response Requires Navigation

A company that responded to a discovery request by turning over more than 400,000 pages of undifferentiated documents in an electronic format must provide a "modicum" of guidance about how the material was gathered and organized, a federal magistrate judge has ruled.

Magistrate Judge David E. Peebles ruled that Pass & Seymour, a Syracuse, N.Y., business, failed to either categorize the information under the document headings requested by Hubbell Incorporated, the defendant in Pass & Seymour's copyright infringement action, or to organize the data in an intelligible way.

Hubbell asked for information in what Magistrate Judge Peebles called 72 "wide-ranging and broadly worded" categories. In response, Pass & Seymour delivered the documents in 220 unlabeled computer folders -- the way the company said they were kept in "the ordinary course of business."

Peebles said that was akin to receiving 405,367 pages of documents stuffed into more than 80 bankers' boxes. As such, the response did not meet the company's obligation under the recently amended Rule 34(b)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

"A party who in response to a discovery demand has chosen to produce documents as they are ordinarily maintained must do just that - produce the documents organized as they are maintained in the ordinary course of producing party's business, with at least some modicum of information regarding how they are ordinarily kept in order to allow the requesting party to make meaningful use of the documents," the magistrate judge wrote in Pass & Seymour v. Hubbell Incorporated, 5:07-cv-00945.

To make information meaningful, parties have to provide their adversaries with some context to help them navigate their way through it, according to the magistrate judge.