The court reinforced that ESI discovery must remain proportional and reasonably accessible under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26, declining to compel approval of an expansive, plaintiff-proposed ESI protocol. Although the plaintiff argued that the defendant failed to timely respond to written discovery and provide sufficient justification for its objections, the court found the written discovery dispute moot due to a court-approved extension. As a baseline matter, the court emphasized that discovery demands requiring identification and searching of all potential electronic systems and unspecified additional sources are disfavored where they impose undue burden and cost relative to the needs of the case.
” Rule 26(b)(2)(B) provides that, with respect to ESI, “[a] party need not provide discovery of [ESI] from sources that the party identifies as not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost.” When applying the Rule, the court credited the defendant’s evidence that compliance would require searching tens of thousands of mailboxes across numerous healthcare facilities, making the requested ESI not reasonably accessible. Rather than compelling production, the court directed the parties to meet and confer to substantially narrow the protocol to custodians, systems, and sources reasonably expected to yield relevant information. The court reiterated that cooperation among counsel is the preferred mechanism for resolving ESI scope disputes, particularly in cases involving large organizations with complex and legacy data environments.
With respect to keyword searches, the court declined to compel searches that generated over one million hits and more than a terabyte of data, noting the defendant’s detailed explanation of technical and operational constraints. Where the defendant agreed to targeted searches and provided hit reports, the court deemed related disputes moot. The decision underscores that courts will not endorse speculative or open-ended ESI protocols and expect parties to support burden objections with concrete technical detail while engaging in good-faith negotiations to craft defensible, proportional discovery strategies.
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