Oxbow Carbon & Minerals LLC v. Union Pacific R.R. Co.

Facts

Plaintiffs sued, alleging that Defendants violated antitrust laws. Plaintiffs claimed Defendants conspired to fix fuel rates and surcharges at anticompetitive levels and maintain a monopoly. Plaintiffs claimed it paid $50 million in illegal fuel charges as a result and sought treble damages plus lost profits. During discovery, Plaintiffs produced documents from 19 records custodians. However, Defendants sought the records of William Koch, Plaintiffs’ founder, CEO, and principal. Defendants claimed Koch had unique information that would show market forces—not the alleged railroad conspiracy—caused increasing rail freight costs and Plaintiffs’ losses. Plaintiffs resisted the discovery as unduly burdensome, expensive, and duplicative of the documents already produced by its 19 records custodians. However, Plaintiffs willingly conducted a sample search to determine the relevant percentage. A vendor searched almost half a million documents from Koch’s physical and electronic files, at a cost of $57,000. About 12 percent returned as responsive, and Plaintiffs produced about 1,300 records from that sampling. But Plaintiffs estimated that searching, reviewing, and producing the remainder would cost another $85,000 and objected to production as unduly burdensome and costly. Alternatively, Plaintiffs asked the court to shift the production costs to Defendants .