## Facts

- Direct purchasers of containerboard products brought a putative class action alleging that major containerboard producers conspired to fix prices in violation of Sherman Act § 1.
- The decision addressed discovery only, not the merits of the antitrust claims.
- Plaintiffs sought to compel production of electronically stored information (ESI) from additional sources, including certain backup media and other repositories, and to require two defendants to search more custodians.
- Temple-Inland and International Paper opposed expanding custodian searches as burdensome and disproportionate.
- Georgia-Pacific moved for a protective order to limit discovery it characterized as unduly burdensome and broader than necessary at that stage.
- The court managed the dispute in a setting of extensive meet-and-confer efforts, including court-facilitated conferences, and framed discovery management as requiring cooperation and transparency.

## Issues

1. Whether defendants had to search and produce ESI from “reasonably accessible” sources and whether certain backup/legacy sources were “not reasonably accessible” due to undue burden or cost under Rule 26(b)(2)(B).
2. Whether plaintiffs showed sufficient need to compel Temple-Inland and International Paper to add specific additional document custodians.
3. Whether Georgia-Pacific was entitled to protective relief narrowing or deferring aspects of plaintiffs’ discovery requests as overbroad or disproportionate.
4. Whether the court should require a particular ESI search methodology, rather than evaluating the reasonableness of the process used.

## Decision

- Plaintiffs’ motions to compel were granted in part and denied in part.
- Georgia-Pacific’s motion for a protective order was granted in part.
- The court required additional discovery in targeted areas where likely relevance justified the burden, but rejected broader requests where the marginal benefit did not justify expense and delay.
- The court declined to impose a categorical requirement that parties use any particular e-discovery technology, focusing instead on whether the discovery process was reasonable and conducted in good faith.
- No sanctions were imposed; the court directed continued cooperative, iterative refinement of discovery protocols.

## Legal Principles

- Under Rule 26(b)(2)(B), a party need not produce ESI from sources that are not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost, absent a showing of good cause.
- Proportionality governs ESI discovery: courts balance the likely importance of the requested information against burden, cost, redundancy, and delay.
- Discovery management favors cooperation, transparency about data sources and constraints, and negotiated search protocols, with judicial intervention used to resolve remaining disputes.
- The standard is reasonable, good-faith search and production practices; courts generally evaluate adequacy rather than mandate a specific search technology.
- Requests to add custodians are assessed custodian-by-custodian, weighing the custodian’s connection to relevant events against cumulative burden and duplicative retrieval.

## Conclusion

The court issued a fact-specific discovery order that limited expansive ESI demands and some proposed custodian additions under Rule 26 proportionality and accessibility standards, granted partial protective relief, and emphasized cooperative discovery while refusing to dictate a particular search technology absent a showing that the existing process was unreasonable.


Kleen Prods. LLC v. Packaging Corp. of Am., No. 10 C 5711, 2012 WL 4498465 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 28, 2012)