If you visited this blawg earlier this year, you may recall a series of posts in which I examined an emerging circuit split over the scope of recoverable e-discovery costs. I recently had the pleasure of contributing a short article on the subject to the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (or "ACEDS") entitled "Will E-Discovery Cost Recovery Catch the Supreme Court's Eye?"
The article offers seven reasons why the issue of recoverable e-discovery costs might find itself on the high court's plenary docket in the near future. Here is the editor's abstract:
Despite its many benefits over manual review, e-discovery services still remain prohibitively expensive for many litigants. The cost to process, review, cull and produce a single gigabyte of data exceeds $7,000, according to some estimates. Needless to say, the bills pile up quickly for parties in even the most modest cases in which ESI is at issue. In recent years, parties prevailing at trial have requested that their opponents pay these e-discovery expenses by the federal "taxation of costs" statute, at Title 28, USC Section 1920(4). While some US courts have broadly interpreted this law to allow recovery of a wide range of e-discovery costs, others have been far more stingy. Now, as high profile rulings in different judicial circuits have taken conflicting paths, a drumbeat for clarification on the issue is loudening. Nicholas Wagoner, an attorney at Rogers, Morris & Grover and author of the blawg CircuitSplits, says that the issue is ripe for Supreme Court review. In this ACEDS exclusive, Wagoner builds a case for how e-discovery could soon crash the high court's docket.
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