§ 2031.280.Production of documents; form; date of

Getting documents into the demanding party's hands is only half the job; this section governs how the production itself has to be organized and, for electronically stored information, in what format. Any documents or category of documents produced have to be identified with the specific request number they respond to, so the demanding party can match what arrived against what was asked for rather than sorting through an undifferentiated pile.

Timing follows the demand itself: production happens on the date specified under Section 2031.030, unless an objection has been made to that date, or on whatever date the parties agreed to under Section 2031.270 if the original date was extended. For electronically stored information, a responding party that objects to a specified form of production, or that receives a demand specifying no form at all, has to state in its response which form or forms it intends to use.

The section then supplies the default rule that governs most of the litigation over ESI form: unless the parties agree otherwise or the court orders otherwise, a demand that does not specify a form requires production in the form or forms in which the information is ordinarily maintained, or in a form that is reasonably usable, and a party never has to produce the same information in more than one form. That default matters because the choice between native format and something like a converted PDF can determine whether metadata, searchability, and functionality survive the production, which is precisely why this provision generates so much of the friction in modern e-discovery. Finally, if data compilations included in the demand need translation into a reasonably usable form, the responding party has to perform that translation, through detection devices if necessary, at the demanding party's reasonable expense, a cost allocation that keeps the burden of decoding obscure formats from falling entirely on the party that happened to create or store the data that way.