Antitrust Plaintiffs Ordered to Pay E-Discovery Costs

In a ruling that may send shivers up the spines of some plaintiffs lawyers, a federal judge in Pittsburgh has ruled that the winning defendants in an antitrust case are entitled to reimbursement of more than $367,000 in e-discovery costs.

In his 25-page opinion in Race Tires America Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp., Judge Terrence F. McVerry of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania found that courts are increasingly approving awards of e-discovery costs, noting that one judge described them as "the 21st century equivalent of making copies."

Lead plaintiffs attorney Joseph Decker of Babst Calland Clements & Zomnir in Pittsburgh argued that the costs should be disallowed because "electronic document collection, hard drive imaging and indexing and searching, commonly referred to as 'e-discovery charges,' are not enumerated under Section 1920(4), and thus are not properly deemed recoverable costs."

But McVerry found that Congress, in the Judicial Administration and Technical Amendments Act of 2008, modified the wording of Section 1920(4), changing the phrase "fees for exemplifications and copies of papers" to read "fees for exemplification and the costs of making copies of any materials."

Since that amendment, McVerry said, "no court has categorically excluded e-discovery costs from allowable costs."

But even before the 2008 law, McVerry found that "courts in many jurisdictions had come to recognize that 'exemplification,' in the modern era, includes electronic copying."

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Source: law.com
By: Shannon P. Duffy