## Facts

- Independent Living Center of Southern California sued the City of Los Angeles in January 2012.
- During discovery, the plaintiff served an electronic-discovery request that required the City to review more than two million items of electronically stored information (ESI).
- The parties could not agree on a search and screening protocol to identify responsive, nonprivileged material from the ESI.
- Because the protocol dispute persisted, the parties missed the court’s September 2013 discovery-completion deadline.
- Over roughly nine months, the court held 11 conferences with the parties (often lasting an hour or more) to try to resolve the ESI-search dispute.
- When agreement still did not occur, the court ordered the City to use predictive coding (a form of technology-assisted review, or TAR) to identify 10,000 of the most relevant ESI documents.
- The City retained Equivio (a contractor) to conduct the TAR work.
- In mid-June 2014, the court held another conference and ordered the plaintiff to review the documents Equivio identified.
- After that conference, the plaintiff asked the court to require Equivio to run a quality-assurance (QA) test on the TAR-selected documents.
- The court drafted four questions aimed at obtaining Equivio’s views on whether QA testing was needed and instructed the parties’ technical experts to discuss those questions with Equivio.
- The technical experts returned with conflicting accounts of Equivio’s answers, and the court convened a further conference in late June 2014 to address the dispute.

## Issues

1. Whether, under the court’s discovery-management authority, the plaintiff was entitled to an order requiring the TAR vendor to conduct additional QA testing of the predictive-coding results before the review proceeded.
2. How a federal court should resolve continuing disputes over TAR protocols where the parties have missed deadlines and cannot agree on search methodology for a large ESI population.

## Decision

- The court continued active supervision of the ESI dispute after repeated meet-and-confer failures and missed deadlines.
- The court required the City to use predictive coding (TAR) to identify a set of 10,000 documents deemed most relevant from a multi-million-document ESI population.
- The court ordered the plaintiff to proceed with review of the TAR-identified documents.
- The court addressed the plaintiff’s request for additional vendor QA by soliciting the vendor’s views through targeted questions and expert discussions, then convened an additional hearing to resolve the parties’ conflicting accounts and determine what, if any, further testing would be required.

## Legal Principles

- Trial courts have broad discretion under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to manage discovery, set search protocols for ESI, and modify procedures when party negotiations fail.
- Technology-assisted review, including predictive coding, may be ordered as a reasonable method to identify relevant documents in large ESI matters, particularly where keyword-only approaches and cooperative planning have broken down.
- Discovery-management decisions may consider proportionality, delay, burden, and the need to move the case forward when disputes threaten deadlines.
- When parties disagree about the reliability of a TAR process, courts may require targeted information-gathering (including input from technical personnel) and may structure additional testing or decline it depending on the showing made and the costs and delays involved.

## Conclusion

In this pretrial discovery ruling, the district court managed a prolonged dispute over how to search and screen more than two million ESI items by directing the City to use predictive coding to identify 10,000 highly relevant documents, ordering the plaintiff to review that set, and addressing a follow-on request for additional quality-assurance testing through court-directed vendor questions, expert consultations, and further hearings to resolve disagreement and keep discovery moving.


Independent Living Center of Southern California v. City of Los Angeles, No. 2:12 Civ. 551 (2014)