Race Tires America, Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp.

674 F.3d 158 (2012)

Facts

P sued D for antitrust violations from the adoption of a 'single tire rule' for certain motorsports and the related exclusive supply contracts for race tires between D and a number of sanctioning bodies. The parties engaged in extensive discovery of ESI. The Court directed the parties to attempt to agree upon a list of keyword search terms, with a party's use of such terms carrying a presumption that it had fulfilled its 'obligation to conduct a reasonable search.' The court ordered the results to 'be produced in 'Tagged Image File Format,'' accompanied by 'a cross reference or unitization file, in standard format (e.g. Opticon, Summation DII, or the like) showing the Bates number of each page and the appropriate unitization of the documents.' They were to further identify specific metadata fields that had to be produced if reasonably available. The parties were to produce 'an extracted text file or searchable version . . . for each electronic document in a document-level text file (except for any file produced in native format).' Ds hired vendors to comply. The activities conducted by the vendors were as follows: (1) preservation and collection of ESI; (2) processing the collected ESI; (3) keyword searching; (4) culling privileged material; (5) scanning and TIFF conversion; (6) optical character recognition ('OCR') conversion; and (7) conversion of racing videos from VHS format to DVD format. D produced 430,733 pages and DMS produced 178,413 documents in electronic format. The total charges were $365,000. Ds moved for summary judgment. It was granted. Ds were then awarded costs of $365,000 under Rule 54(d). P eventually appealed.