Corker v. Costco

Make note of a decision from early this year, Corker v. Costco Wholesale, No. C19-0290RSL (W.D. Wash. Apr. 27, 2020), in which the Court granted a motion to compel the unredacted native Excel version of a document originally produced as a PDF of more than 2,000 pages, and denied the producing party’s motion for protective order for confidential information in the spreadsheet instead opting to grant a motion to seal the document as a whole.

The Court held that, “The PDF images of the spreadsheets suffer from similar problems. Even if the PDF images of the spreadsheet pages are ‘readable’ and ‘searchable’, they cannot be sorted or filtered as the original spreadsheet could be. Thus, they are likely not in a ‘reasonably usable form’ for purposes of Rule 34(b)(2)(E).”