In a recent commercial breach of contract case, the plaintiffs sued for $10 million in alleged damages. They submitted a 25-page e-discovery request, asking for all electronically stored information (ESI) covering more than 100 topics and 300 search terms.
The defendants argued that the request would cost $2 million and produce more than 300 million pages of irrelevant documents. The court agreed that the burden was out of proportion to the value and needs of the case, and it approved a phased discovery plan that reduced the number of search words to seven. As a result, the defendant’s e-discovery costs were cut approximately 95 percent, to less than $100,000.
