## Facts

- Matthew Edwards and other plaintiffs, on behalf of a putative class of purchasers of milk and related products, sued the National Milk Producers Federation and other dairy entities, including Land O’Lakes, Inc., in federal court.
- The lawsuit was part of federal antitrust-related litigation alleging coordinated conduct affecting milk supply and prices, including allegations tied to a herd-retirement program.
- During discovery, the parties faced significant electronically stored information (ESI) requiring review for responsiveness and privilege.
- Plaintiffs (class members) and Land O’Lakes negotiated a written protocol to use technology-assisted review (TAR), sometimes described as predictive coding, to identify responsive, nonprivileged ESI in Land O’Lakes’ possession.
- The parties presented their agreed TAR protocol to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and requested that the court enter it as an order governing this portion of discovery.
- The protocol contemplated an iterative TAR workflow and included quality-control steps, including a validation process and the sharing of tracking information about that validation process with plaintiffs.
- The discovery order addressed the process for identifying and producing responsive, nonprivileged documents; it was not a ruling on the merits of the antitrust claims.

## Issues

1. May a federal district court approve the use of TAR/predictive coding for ESI review in discovery when the producing party and requesting party jointly stipulate to a defined protocol?
2. When parties stipulate to a TAR protocol, what process protections (such as validation steps and shared reporting) may be required as conditions of using TAR for responsiveness review?

## Decision

- The court approved the parties’ stipulated protocol authorizing the use of TAR/predictive coding to review ESI for responsiveness and production.
- The court entered the stipulation as an order governing Land O’Lakes’ TAR-based review and production, including the protocol’s validation process and related reporting/tracking commitments.
- The order functioned as a case-management decision in discovery rather than a contested ruling resolving liability or class-wide merits questions.

## Legal Principles

- The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allow parties and courts to manage ESI discovery using reasonable methods suited to the scale and burden of the case, with attention to proportionality.
- TAR/predictive coding may be used to identify responsive ESI where the process is structured and documented, and where counsel remains responsible for the adequacy of the review and production.
- Courts may give substantial weight to a negotiated, written discovery protocol submitted by the parties, particularly when it sets out concrete steps for training, quality control, and validation.
- A TAR protocol can include transparency measures—such as sharing tracking data about the validation process—to give the requesting party a basis to assess whether the process is functioning as agreed.
- Entry of a stipulated TAR order generally reflects approval of the parties’ method for conducting review and production; it does not convert the protocol into a guarantee of perfect recall, and later disputes may be addressed through the court’s ordinary discovery supervision tools if results appear deficient.

## Conclusion

In *Edwards v. National Milk Producers Federation*, the Northern District of California entered a stipulated discovery order permitting Land O’Lakes to use TAR/predictive coding to review ESI for responsiveness and produce responsive, nonprivileged documents under an agreed protocol that included validation steps and the sharing of tracking data from that validation process.


Edwards v. National Milk Producers Federation, No. 3:11 Civ. 4766 (2013)