From In re ClassicStar Mare Lease Litig., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 9750 (E.D. Ky. Feb. 2, 2009):

[T]his Court entered Orders requiring an extensive production of financial information from GeoStar and its many subsidiaries…. The Orders did not specify the format for electronic production of these documents. On September 11, 2008, GeoStar produced 273,000 pages of these records to all parties in the MDL. The documents were initially produced in .pdf and Excel format. GeoStar then converted the documents to .tif documents with .dii load files and OCR so that the documents could be readily loaded into the parties' Summation or Concordance (both litigation document management software) databases for ease of searching. GeoStar then produced the documents with these modifications.

On October 2, 2008, the West Hills Plaintiffs sought a telephonic conference with the undersigned which resulted in an order to produce the documents in their native format. The undersigned also directed, however, that West Hills should depose a GeoStar representative to determine the impact that production of that information in native format would have upon the operations of GeoStar, inviting GeoStar to file a Motion for a Protective Order if necessary following the gathering of that information.

On October 17, 2008, GeoStar's Chief Financial Officer, Fred Lambert, appeared and discussed the impact that a native format production would have on GeoStar. He identified three reasons that the production of the financial information would be extremely difficult and burdensome on GeoStar: (1) GeoStar would have to redact all financial information pertaining to Gastar Exploration, Inc., pursuant to a confidentiality agreement between those companies; (2) GeoStar would have to redact information outside the requested time period; and (3) GeoStar would have to review older data and repair any corrupted data.

Fed. R. Civ. P. 34 provides that, if the requesting party fails to specify a format, "a party must produce it in a form or forms in which it is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form or forms." Fed. R. Civ. P. 34(b)(2)(E)(ii). Under Fed. R. Civ. P. 34(b)(2)(E)(iii), "a party need not produce the same electronically stored information in more than one form."

The 2006 Advisory Committee Notes to Rule 34 provide the following guidance:

The rule does not require a party to produce electronically stored information in the form in which it is ordinarily maintained, as long as it is produced in a reasonably usable form . . . If the responding party ordinarily maintains the information it is producing in a way that makes it searchable by electronic means, the information should not be produced in a form that removes or significantly degrades this feature.

Further, the Manual for Complex Litigation, § 11.446, provides that:

Against the backdrop of heightened demands for usability and searchability of the electronic discovery produced in a multi-district case, is the need for the parties to confer on the format of the production, keeping in mind that the responding party is best situated to evaluate the procedures, and the need to produce the information in a reasonably usable form to enable the receiving party to access, search, and display the information.

In re Seroquel Prod. Liability Litig., 244 F.R.D. 650, 655 (M.D. Fla. 2007) (citing Manual for Complex Litigation, § 11.446 (4th ed.)).

GeoStar takes the position that GeoStar's original production, thus, met and satisfied the requirements of Fed. R. Civ. P. 34(b)(2)(E). See Autotech Tech. Ltd. Partnership v. Automtaiondirect.com, Inc., 248 F.R.D. 556, 559-60 (N.D. Ill. 2008) (where a party does not specify a format in which the documents are to be produced, production of documents in .pdf and .tif format "complied with the ordinary meaning of Rule 34"). GeoStar argues that it had the option to produce the documents in their native format or in an alternative format that was "reasonably usable" and that did not "significantly degrade" the searchability function of the documents. See United States v. O'Keefe, 537 F.Supp.2d 14, 23 (D.D.C. 2008) ("production of the electronically stored information in PDF or TIFF format would suffice, unless defendants can show that those formats are not 'reasonably usable' and that the native format, with the accompanying metadata, meet the criteria of 'reasonably usable' whereas the PDF or TIFF formats do not").

***The question before the Court, then, is whether GeoStar's original production was "reasonably usable" under Fed. R. Civ. P. 34(b)(2)(E). If the production made was "reasonably usable" and the non-native format did not "significantly degrade" the searchability of the documents, Geostar argues that it should not be required to make a second production and that the burden is on the West Hills Plaintiffs to provide proof that the production does not meet these requirements. See, e.g., Perfect Barrier LLC v. Woodsmart Solution, Inc., No. 3:07-cv-103-JVB, 2008 WL 2230192, *3 (N.D. Ind. May 27, 2008).

To answer this question, the Court must consider whether by producing the financial data which resides in the OGSYS, Creative Solutions, and Checkbook Solutions accounting software solutions without its embedded metadata, GeoStar has run afoul of its obligations under Fed. R. Civ. P. 34. The Court concludes that, in light of the Court's prior Orders and the phrasing of the specific requests for this data, that GeoStar has not necessarily erred by producing the documents in .pdf and .tif formats. Indeed, GeoStar apparently produced the documents in a format which was most likely to be usable — to some extent — by any of the parties to this lawsuit, none of whom had the necessary software for the native format data at the time of the production. In other words, the West Hills Plaintiffs have received, to the best of the Court's knowledge, the production that their Request sought.

Nonetheless, the Court ordered production of the documents in native format in light of communications between counsel reflecting an agreement to do so.