On July 29, 2016, the Washington District Court found that the requesting party is responsible for the costs to retrieve archived emails discoverable under Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1).
In this case Plaintiff did not meet his burden to show good cause, which would have overcome Defendant’s showing that producing the archived emails was costly and burdensome. However, the archived emails were “discoverable” under Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1). As a consequence in this case, upon Plaintiff’s request, “Defendant should facilitate access to the discovery, but should do so only at Plaintiff’s expense, payable in advance. Plaintiff should be responsible for all costs, such as retrieving and restoring the backup tapes to an accessible format, except for costs relating to Defendant’s review of the information for privileged material (which is like any other discovery request, e.g., the live emails)”.
Elkharwily v. Franciscan Health Sys., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 99795 *, 2016 WL 4061575 (W.D. Wash. July 29, 2016) can be downloaded at https://casetext.com…
Originally published on Technethics in November 2016