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Federal E-Discovery: Unless Manifestly Unreasonable, Courts Defer to Responding Party’s Custodian Designations
December 5, 2023
Litigation partners Chris Boehning and Dan Toal’s latest Federal E-Discovery column, “Unless Manifestly Unreasonable, Courts Defer to Responding Party’s Custodian Designations,” appeared in the December 5 issue of the New York Law Journal. The authors discuss two recent decisions that provide clarity in disputes over which custodians to include in the scope of discovery collection—a topic that has suffered from a dearth of precedential authority. While the outcomes in the two cases differ, the published decisions on motions to compel designation of additional custodians outline a shared legal standard. The courts found that, absent agreement among the parties, the responding party is most likely to know who would have relevant information and is thus entitled to select the custodians. They also found that court intervention in the selection of custodians may be appropriate when the requesting party can prove that the responding party’s custodian choices are manifestly unreasonable or that the resulting production was deficient, among other exceptions. Deputy chair and counsel, e-discovery, Ross Gotler and e-discovery attorney Lidia Kekis assisted in the preparation of this article.
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