The United States District Court for the District of Nebraska has published a guide on how to prepare a bill of costs under 28 U.S.C. § 1920, which allows a party who gets a verdict in their favor to be reimbursed for certain costs by the losing party. It's dated January 2020, and is available at: https://www.ned.uscourts.gov/internetDocs/info/taxation-of-costs.pdf . The Tip of the Night for May 6, 2021 discussed a Taxation of Costs guide prepared by the District of Massachusetts, and the Tip of the Night for June 21, 2021 reviewed one posted by the Eastern District of Washington. These are some key points in the Nebraska guide you will not find repeated in every discussion of the taxation of costs.
On page 7 the guide states that, "Electronic media support fees produced solely for the convenience of counsel (e.g., ASCII expenses, costs of realtime transcripts, condensed transcripts, scanning and hyperlinking, and rough drafts)" . . . may not be taxed. Some districts have different rules about reimbursement for realtime fees. For example, a guide on the taxation of costs prepared the District of South Dakota states that, "[t]he requesting party must provide an explanation as to why it was
necessary to have any transcript produced in an expedited manner, including Realtime trial/hearing transcript feeds.", even though it too instructs that, "[c]osts of expedited transcripts produced solely for the convenience of counsel" may not be taxed.
The Nebraska guide instructs that in compensating for a witness's travel expenses, the prevailing party should refer to rates listed at www.gsa.gov/mileage when the witness uses his or her own vehicle for a trip, and to www.gsa.gov/perdiem for the maximum that may be charged for a 'subsistence allowance' when the witness has an overnight stay for a trial. A witness driving a car to a courthouse is reimbursed at a rate of 70 cents per mile as of January 1, 2025. Surprisingly rates are listed for trips made by privately owned airplanes and motorcycles as well!
A witness who takes a commercial flight, or a train trip, must "utilize a common carrier at the most economical rate reasonably available". While the guide doesn't refer to it, note that the General Services Administration has another page, https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-a-trip/transportation-airfare-rates-pov-rates-etc/airfare-rates-city-pair-program, on which it lets you search for the cost of a flight between any two cities, but also note that these prices may be lower than a witness can obtain because the government contracts for discounted fares.
The per diem costs may vary widely depending on what city a witness stays in, and at what time of year. $342 in New York City in December, but only $165 in Lake Placid at the same time, but $238 in Lake Placid, and actually one dollar cheaper in New York City in July.
The guide states that the clerk will not tax, "Routine expenses for copies made for discovery purposes, including discovery costs associated with scanning or converting ESI to a useable format." This differs from the decision in Johns Manville Corp. v. Knauf Insulation, LLC, 15-cv-00531-RBJ-KLM, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 88189 (D. Colo. May 25, 2018), in which the District of Colorado held that § 1920(4) should cover the costs of scanning and conversion to the TIFF and PDF image formats, following the Third Circuit precedent in Race Tires Amer., Inc. v. Hoosier Racing Tire, Corp., 674 F.3d 158 (3d Cir. 2012). See the Tip of the Night for May 29, 2018.
