Law Blog 2.0

The general rule in discovery is whatever agreement is reached between opposing parties during a meet and confer (under Fed. R. Civ. P. Rule 26(f)) controls the form of production. See e.g., Williams v. Sprint/United Management Co.,230 F.R.D. 640 (D.Kan.2005)(finding that a producing party must produce electronic documents with meta-data, unless that the parties agree that meta-data should not be produced or the producing party seeks a protective order), In the event the other side (with full knowledge) agrees to a production of TIFF images without OCR text without any meta-data — this agreement would likely control, and such a production probably could not be successfully challenged. However, as is more often the case, the parties do not address the issue of an acceptable production format and each party is thus left to determine how to produce documents in a reasonably usable format. In this situation a producing party is free to produce the data as it was originally stored or in another format that is reasonably usable (which typically means that key elements of meta-data are left intact and the electronic data is [...]