ARCHIVED CONTENT
You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.A recent post by Craig Ball led me to an interesting classification opinion in an antitrust case. Essentially, the parties were working out classification protocols and asked for the court’s input on one issue — namely, what to do if the Boolean keyword search was unproductive or not productive enough. The plaintiffs wanted a “random” sample of the responding set to try to fine tune the search pattern. The defendants objected, reasoning that a random sample would require them to produce non-responsive documents which they had no obligation to do under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In ruling for the plaintiffs, the court reasoned that “[t]he point of random sampling is to eliminate irrelevant documents from the group identified by a computerized search and focus the parties’ search on relevant documents only.”