The federal government must provide documents "in a usable format" when it responds to Freedom of Information Act requests, a federal judge in Manhattan has ruled.
Southern District of New York Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, after faulting the government for offering "a lame excuse" for delivering non-searchable documents, ruled for the first time that federal agencies must turn over documents that include "metadata," which allows them to be searched and indexed.
Scheindlin also ruled that "common sense dictates" that the handling of FOIA requests should be informed by "the spirit if not the letter" of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which govern the handling of electronic information stored in computers.
Writing more broadly, Scheindlin noted that "even highly respected private lawyers, government lawyers and professors of law" need to comply with judges' expectations that adversaries "meet and confer" to minimize the cost and delay often associated with e-discovery.
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Source: Law.com
By: Daniel Wise
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