Criminal

Date: 12/12/2018

Split objected to the award of $225,180.57 incurred by Trek as part of its e-discovery efforts. Split argued that the court should follow the rule in Race Tires America, Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp., 674 F.3d 158 (3d Cir.2012), holding that with respect to electronically stored information, Section 1920(4) authorizes shifting of costs only for the “scanning of hard copy documents, the conversion of native files to TIFF, and the transfer of VHS tapes to DVD.”

The Court looked at the interpretation of Race Tires noting that the statute has been drawn narrowly in almost all cases. Citing In re Online DVD-Rental Antitrust Litigation, 779 F.3d 914 (9th Cir.2015),which rejected costs for applying keywords, and Colosi v. Jones Lang LaSalle Americas, Inc., 781 F.3d 293 (6th Cir.2015), which allowed for the imaging of a hard drive to be interpreted as making a copy, the Court reduced the award. The Court allowed the shifting of costs only for: costs of copying metadata and hard drives, bates stamping, shipping and delivery of electronic documents, native file and email conversion, and TIFF image creation and conversion.