## Facts

- More than thirty Latino plaintiffs brought a civil-rights class action against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and certain agents, alleging unlawful early-morning home entries and searches without warrants or consent.
- Plaintiffs sought damages under *Bivens* and injunctive relief barring similar future searches.
- During discovery, the parties did not timely agree on the form of production for electronically stored information (ESI), including whether metadata would be produced.
- ICE produced electronic documents largely in non-native, image-based formats.
- Plaintiffs moved to compel production of metadata associated with ICE’s electronic documents, including re-production in native format to obtain metadata.

## Issues

1. Whether metadata associated with ICE’s ESI is discoverable and, if so, what categories of metadata must be produced.
2. How Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34’s form-of-production provisions apply when the parties failed to specify a production format early in the case.
3. Whether requiring additional metadata production or re-production would be proportional in light of relevance, burden, and the usability of the production already made.

## Decision

- The court granted the motion to compel in part and denied it in part.
- The court declined to impose a blanket rule requiring production of all metadata or native files in every case.
- The court required targeted metadata production where plaintiffs showed the metadata was relevant or necessary to make the documents reasonably usable.
- The court denied requests for broad, undifferentiated metadata production where the request was cumulative, insufficiently justified, or unduly burdensome relative to likely benefit.

## Legal Principles

- Metadata is not categorically exempt from discovery; it may be discoverable when relevant to disputed issues such as authorship, timing, authenticity, editing history, or spoliation.
- Under Rule 34, a requesting party may specify the form of ESI production; if no form is specified, the responding party must produce ESI as ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form.
- Whether metadata must be produced depends on case-specific showings of relevance and proportionality, including the volume of ESI, the burden of extraction and review, and whether the existing production is reasonably usable.
- Failure to address ESI format and metadata during early meet-and-confer and case management increases the likelihood of later court intervention and narrower, issue-focused orders.

## Conclusion

The court treated metadata as potentially discoverable ESI and ordered limited, targeted production tied to relevance and usability, while rejecting a universal entitlement to all metadata absent a concrete showing that the additional fields were necessary and proportional.


Aguilar v. Immigr. & Customs Enf’t Div. of U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., 255 F.R.D. 350 (S.D.N.Y. 2008)