## Facts

- Royalty owners sued an oil-and-gas producer; the opinion addressed only discovery obligations.
- During discovery, the producer produced about 20,000 pages of paper documents.
- At the requesting party’s request, the producer scanned the documents and produced them as searchable PDF files.
- The requesting party argued the PDFs were not organized in a usable way and sought an order requiring re-organization under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34(b)(2)(E)(i).
- The court issued an order directing the producer to organize the production consistent with Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i).
- The producer moved for reconsideration, arguing it had already complied and that further organization would be unduly burdensome.

## Issues

1. Whether producing scanned, searchable PDFs of paper documents satisfies Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i) as production “as kept in the usual course of business.”
2. Whether, absent a showing that the PDFs preserved usual-course organization, Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i) required the producer to organize and label documents to correspond to request categories.
3. What level of organization Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i) requires to prevent an unusable “document dump” without forcing an onerous, document-by-document index.

## Decision

- The court granted the motion for reconsideration in part and denied it in part, modifying its earlier discovery directive.
- Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i) provides two alternatives: a party must produce documents as kept in the usual course of business, or it must organize and label them to correspond to the categories in the requests.
- The court held that scanning documents into searchable PDFs does not, by itself, establish compliance with the “usual course of business” option.
- The producer was not required to create a perfect index or label every document with a specific request number.
- The producer was required to ensure its production satisfied one of Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i)’s two options, either by demonstrating the PDFs preserved the usual-course organization or by reasonably organizing and labeling the production by request categories.

## Legal Principles

- Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i) is an either-or rule: a producing party must (1) produce documents as kept in the usual course of business, or (2) organize and label them to correspond to the request categories.
- A producing party cannot rely on the “usual course of business” option if the production strips away the original organizational context that makes the files usable.
- Searchability (e.g., keyword-searchable PDFs) does not substitute for organization that corresponds to request categories when the “organize and label” option applies.
- Courts may require sufficient organizational information to make a production usable while rejecting demands for exhaustive, document-by-document labeling when disproportionate to the needs of the case.

## Conclusion

The court narrowed its prior discovery order and held that a large production of scanned, searchable PDFs must either preserve the producing party’s usual-course filing structure or be reasonably organized and labeled by request categories; searchability alone does not satisfy Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(i), but the rule also does not compel an elaborate index or perfect document-level tagging.


Anderson Living Trust v. WPX Energy Prod., LLC, 298 F.R.D. 514 (D.N.M. 2014)