Plaintiffs,Pay,the,Tab,Netflix law Plaintiffs Pay the Tab in Netflix Case
Bankruptcy is a situation, wherein an individual is termed as unable to discharge all the debts. When a person or a company is not able to pay off its creditors, it has an obligation to file a bankruptcy suit. In fact, a bankruptcy suit is a When you work with an attorney, you will have no problem reducing the risks associated with getting your case in front of a judge and jury, or other formal court, when you need to. However, every case is different. It is important to work wi
On April 20th, Netflix was awarded $700,000 torecover costs associated with e-discovery, and it all came out of the plaintiffstaxed pockets. Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the Northern District of Californiaawarded the ruling, standing in direct contrast to a recent decision in anotherantitrust case, Race Tires America, Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp, in the Third Circuit. OnMay 14th, plaintiffs filed an appeal to fight the penalty with theNinth Circuit Court of Appeals. More and more cases rely on e-mails, worddocuments, and raw digital data to decide verdicts. Part of e-discoverys costcomes from scanning and converting documents from paper and analog form todigital. There are three essential phases of e-discovery: collection,processing, and review. Processing whittles down and refines these sources ofdata to more viewable forms of data, and review involves the actual evaluationof the information to identify pertinent documents and information. The most laborintensive and demanding phase is review. Hamilton heard the plaintiffs appeal against thetaxed payment. Legally, Electronic Discovery is a fairly new issue.In another case, Race Tires America, Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire Corp, the appellate courtoverturned the districts decision to pay back the defendant over $300,000 fore-discovery costs. This court used theTaxation of Costs statute (Title 28, USC Section 1920(4) to back up theruling. In Hamiltons case, she did not interpret this statute in the same way.One issue with this decision is that it might discourage plaintiffs from filingclass action lawsuits. However, the obvious benefit of a substantial payofffrom a decision would outweigh the costs, typically lower than in this case, ofpaying the bill for a defendants e-discovery.The Netflix case, of the anti-trust variety,involves the allegations that Netflix and Walmart configured a plan tomanipulate US DVD sales and rentals in their favor. The case has Netflix scouringover 1 million records, and plaintiffs are alleging that Netflix is inflating e-discoverycosts, and performing e-discovery in an inefficient manner. E-discovery often mandates that for trialpresentation, files and documents must be in a certain format. In this case,Netflix is converting millions of pages into TIFF format, with correspondingraw data. Plaintiffs feel that Netflix has inadequate documentation for thee-discovery services, and for the complete invoices that they do have, run highabove market standards for these services. While Hamiltons ruling is good for defendants, onething is certain: something has to be done about Section 1920 (4). Without aclear notion of what is and is not covered by discovery, and its rapidlygrowing offshoot e-discovery, these cases cannot be decided reliably. In the meantime,Hamilton has provided respite for tired hands at Netflixs scanners, and a fewheadaches for eager plaintiffs.
Plaintiffs,Pay,the,Tab,Netflix