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212th District Court Protocol for Discovery of Electronically Stored Information — Galveston County. The operative requirements are quoted verbatim from the governing document (registered/posted posted); the document in custody is the controlling text.
Texas > Galveston County > 212th District Court (civil)
The Court encourages the parties to use this Protocol in cases in which there will be discovery of ESI, and to resolve ESI issues informally and without Court supervision whenever possible. … (b) the extent to which Meta-Data, deleted data, or fragmented data, will be subject to litigation hold; … (a) there will be no deletion, modification, alteration of ESI subject to the litigation hold; … The anticipated scope of requests for, and objections to, production of ESI, as well as the form of production of ESI and, specifically, but without limitation, whether production will be of the Native File, Static Image, or other searchable or non-searchable formats. … Because identifying information may not be placed on ESI as easily as bates-stamping paper documents, methods of identifying pages or segments of ESI produced in discovery should be discussed, and, specifically, and without limitation, the following alternatives may be considered by the parties: electronically paginating Native File ESI pursuant to a stipulated agreement that the alteration does not affect admissibility; renaming Native Files using bates-type numbering systems, e.g., ABC0001, ABC0002, ABC0003, with some method of referring to unnumbered “pages” within each file; using software that produces “hash marks” or “hash values” for each Native File; placing pagination on Static Images; or any other practicable method. … Cost sharing for the preservation, retrieval and/or production of ESI, including any discovery database, differentiating between ESI that is reasonably accessible and ESI that is not reasonably accessible; provided however that absent a contrary showing of good cause, the parties should generally presume that the Producing Party bears all costs as to reasonably accessible ESI and, provided further, the parties should generally presume that there will be cost sharing or cost shifting as to ESI that is not reasonably accessible. … Search methodologies for retrieving or reviewing ESI such as identification of the systems to be searched; identification of systems that will not be searched; restrictions or limitations on the search; factors that limit the ability to search; the use of key word searches, with an agreement on the words or terms to be searched; using sampling to search rather than searching all of the records; limitations on the time frame of ESI to be searched; limitations on the fields or document types to be searched; limitations regarding whether back up, archival, legacy or deleted ESI is to be searched; the number of hours that must be expended by the searching party or person in conducting the search and compiling and reviewing ESI; and the amount of pre- production review that is reasonable for the Producing Party to undertake. … Such Meta-Data, however, may not be relevant to the issues presented or, if relevant, not be reasonably subject to discovery given cost-benefit factors.
Reviewer note: Operative mandatory-language provisions quoted verbatim from the posted document; the full document (sha256 6ea9072b670d…) is the controlling text.