Dorce v. City of New York

Background

The plaintiffs’ lawsuit challenges New York City’s Third Party Transfer program. According to the plaintiffs’ description, the program allows defendants to foreclose on properties for asserted tax debts and retain any value exceeding the debt. Plaintiffs claim that the program violates constitutional protections involving property, excessive fines, equal protection, and notice and due process. The municipal defendants and the non-municipal defendants deny that the program or their conduct violates the law.

This document is a joint electronic-discovery submission and proposed order. It is not an opinion resolving the parties’ constitutional, statutory, or common-law claims.

Order Governing Electronic Discovery

The parties agreed that the order would govern the discovery of electronically stored information, meaning electronic records that may be relevant to the lawsuit. The parties stated that they had discussed preservation and did not anticipate needing court intervention at that time.

The order requires the parties to preserve potentially relevant documents and information. It directs each responding party, within 30 days after receiving a written discovery request or entry of an order consistent with the stipulation, to identify a reasonable list of likely electronic-document custodians and offer to meet and confer about that list. The parties must also make reasonable efforts to identify and collect responsive electronic and paper documents from sources such as servers, network drives, and shared drives.

The parties may use keyword searches and other review tools, including technology-assisted review, while remaining subject to their obligations under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The order requires best efforts to preserve relevant metadata. It also provides procedures for reviewing documents for responsiveness, privilege, confidentiality, and personally identifying information before production.

Production and Privilege Rules

The order generally requires paper documents to be scanned and produced electronically under the attached specifications. It addresses extracted text, optical character recognition, color copies, document families, email attachments, native files, databases, audiovisual files, metadata, confidentiality designations, redactions, and document de-duplication. It requires redaction labels to identify the specific basis for a redaction and incorporates the Southern District of New York’s local rule concerning documents withheld as privileged.

The parties also stated that inadvertent production and claw-back procedures were addressed in a separate stipulation and proposed order. Each party would presumptively bear its own costs of preserving, collecting, and producing electronic information, while reserving the right to seek a different allocation of costs if appropriate.

Disposition and Scope

The document states “SO ORDERED” and sets a scheduled court conference for May 3, 2022, with additional conferences or written status reports to be set as needed. The court ordered the discovery protocol but did not rule on the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims or the defendants’ defenses. The signer’s name is not readable in the supplied text; the signature block identifies the signer only as a United States Magistrate Judge.