## Facts

- Race Tires America (RTA) brought an antitrust action against Hoosier Racing Tire Corp. and Dirt Motor Sports, Inc. (DMS).
- Discovery involved extensive electronically stored information (ESI), and the district court ordered production in specified formats, including TIFF conversions, searchable files, Bates-stamped documents, metadata production, and conversion of VHS videos to DVD.
- The district court directed the parties to agree on keyword terms and treated use of those terms as creating a presumption of a reasonable search.
- Hoosier and DMS retained e-discovery vendors to collect and image data, process and filter ESI (including keyword searching and privilege filtering), scan paper documents, convert native files to TIFF, and convert VHS to DVD.
- After Hoosier and DMS obtained summary judgment on the merits, they sought taxation of costs under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d)(1) and 28 U.S.C. § 1920(4), including more than $365,000 in e-discovery vendor charges.
- The district court taxed those vendor charges as recoverable “fees for exemplification” and “costs of making copies.”
- RTA appealed only the costs award.

## Issues

1. Whether vendor charges for e-discovery activities (including collection, processing, keyword searching, deduplication, imaging, and data extraction) are taxable as costs under 28 U.S.C. § 1920(4).
2. Which e-discovery vendor activities, if any, qualify as “fees for exemplification” or as “costs of making copies ... necessarily obtained for use in the case” under § 1920(4).

## Decision

- The Third Circuit vacated the e-discovery costs award and remanded for recalculation.
- The court held that § 1920(4) must be construed narrowly and that Rule 54(d)(1) does not authorize courts to award costs outside the categories Congress enumerated.
- The court rejected treating the vendors’ services as “exemplification.”
- The court held that only a limited subset of vendor charges were taxable as “making copies,” principally:
  - scanning hard-copy documents; and
  - converting native files to TIFF (and comparable file-format conversions necessary to produce copies in the ordered form).
- The court directed that taxable vendor costs be limited to approximately $20,083.51 attributable to scanning and file conversion, rather than the more than $365,000 awarded.

## Legal Principles

- Rule 54(d)(1)’s presumption in favor of awarding costs is bounded by 28 U.S.C. § 1920’s enumerated categories; courts may not award non-enumerated expenses as “costs.”
- Because cost taxation departs from the common law, § 1920 is interpreted narrowly; policy concerns about modern discovery burdens do not expand statutory categories.
- Under § 1920(4), “fees for exemplification” does not encompass general e-discovery vendor work such as data processing, database services, or search-related tasks.
- Under § 1920(4), “costs of making copies” in the ESI context covers reproduction-like tasks (e.g., scanning and required file-format conversion) but not upstream services such as collection, processing, culling, keyword searching, deduplication, hosting, or project management, even if necessary to comply with discovery obligations.

## Conclusion

The Third Circuit held that most e-discovery vendor charges are not taxable under § 1920(4) and limited recoverable costs to scanning and necessary file-format conversion as “making copies,” vacating a substantial vendor-cost award and remanding for a sharply reduced taxation of costs.


Race Tires Am., Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp., 674 F.3d 158 (3d Cir. 2012)