Funderburk et al v. South Carolina Electric & Gas Company

Filing 50

JOINT STIPULATION ESTABLISHING ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY PROTOCOL AND ORDER Signed by Honorable J Michelle Childs on 1/19/2017. Associated Cases: 3:15-cv-04660-JMC et al.(asni, )

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF SOUTH CAROLINA
COLUMBIA DIVISION
Sharon Funderburk and
Thomas Funderburk

)
)
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Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04660-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
John P. Cantwell,

)
)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
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)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04694-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Robert Sherr and
Kristi Sherr,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04695-JMC

1

Harry Crosby,

)
)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04877-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Leonard Anderson and
Karen Anderson,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04887-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Carol Bausinger and
Scott Bausinger,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
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)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04888-JMC

2

Christina Boris and
Glenn Boris,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04889-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Adair Long, Tony Long and
Marion Christopher Long,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
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South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04890-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Will Markham,

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)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04891-JMC

3

Richard Miranda and
Dorothy Miranda,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04892-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Calvin Nesbit and
Jane Nesbit,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04893-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Harry A. Plexico, Jr. and
Margaret S. Plexico,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04894-JMC

4

Jim Reilly and
Rachael Reilly,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04895-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Carlo J. Seigfried,

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)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04896-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Faron Warwick and
Dana Warwick,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
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)
v.
)
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South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04897-JMC

5

Jeanne West,

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)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04898-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Chris Williams and
Catherine Williams,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
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)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04899-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Warren Boyeson and
Christine M. Boyeson,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
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)
v.
)
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South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04920-JMC

6

Karl Hagenmeyer and
Willette Hagenmeyer,

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)
)
Plaintiffs,
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)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04922-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
John E. Retz,

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)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04923-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Jesse L. Soles,

)
)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas,
)
)
Defendant.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04924-JMC

7

Lucas J. Snyder and
Lesley M. Snyder,

)
)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas and
)
The County of Lexington, South Carolina,)
)
Defendants.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:15-04926-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Demario Benjamin and
Kerochedia Amaker,

)
)
)
Plaintiffs,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas and
)
CSX Transportation Inc.,
)
)
Defendants.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:16-01141-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Ann Dennis

)
)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas and
)
CSX Transportation Inc.,
)
)
Defendants.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:16-01142-JMC

8

Richard Green,

)
)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas and
)
CSX Transportation Inc.,
)
)
Defendants.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:16-01143-JMC

________________________________________________________________________
Anthony Melton,

)
)
Plaintiff,
)
)
v.
)
)
South Carolina Electric and Gas and
)
)
Defendants.
)
__________________________________)

Case Number 3:16-01144-JMC

JOINT STIPULATION ESTABLISHING
ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY PROTOCOL
AND
ORDER
In accordance with the Rule 26(f) Report submitted by the parties to the Court on
July 29, 2016, the parties, after conferring, hereby stipulate as follows regarding the
production of electronically stored information (“ESI”) in connection with the abovecaptioned cases and recommend adoption of this protocol as an Order of the Court:

9

ESI Discovery Procedures
1.

Absent a showing of good cause by the requesting party, the parties shall not

be required to modify the procedures used by them in the ordinary course of business to
back-up and archive data; provided however, that the parties will take reasonable steps to
preserve reasonably accessible documents from custodians and sources they have
identified as having relevant information.
2.

Search Terms/Date Ranges: In an attempt to minimize e-discovery costs and

disputes, the parties will meet and confer and agree upon custodians whose files will be
searched, search terms or the use of technology assisted review tools (TAR) to identify the
relevant ESI, and the relevant date ranges for all document reviews and productions.
3.

A producing party may collect some documents by doing “targeted”

collections from custodians or sources based on documents selected by custodians or by
collecting folders identified as containing responsive materials. No party has a duty to
collect and process all data from certain sources, or to run search terms if such collection,
processing and searching creates an undue burden or is not proportional to the needs of the
case.
4.

De-duplication. The parties may eliminate exact duplicates of ESI during

processing across custodial and non-custodial data sources (i.e., global deduplication).
ESI duplicates shall be identified by using industry standard MD5, SHA-1, or SHA-256
algorithms only to create and compare hash values for exact matches only.

10

Privileged Materials
5.

With respect to privileged or work-product information generated after the

filing of the complaint, parties are not required to include any such information in privilege
logs.
6.

The parties agree that if e-mail strings are identified as privileged, only the

metadata at the top of the string need be included on the log, although the parties agree that
if there are any third parties included on any portion of the string withheld, those third
parties will be identified in the log entry.
7.

The parties agree that this Order is an Order entered under Rule 502(d) of the

Federal Rules of Evidence and thus the disclosure of Identified Materials is not a waiver
of the privilege in any other federal or state proceeding.
8.

The treatment of inadvertently-produced privileged materials is governed by

the Confidentiality Agreement and Protective Order, entered by the Court on July 1, 2016.
Format for Document Productions
9.

The parties agree that all documents maintained originally in electronic,

native format (“ESI”) are to be produced in the format specified in in paragraphs 9(a)-(i)
below, where it is reasonable to do so.
a.

Documents will be provided in single-page 300 dpi CCITT Group IV

black and white TIFFs, with page breaks at document end. Each image file will use the
Bates number of the page as its unique file name. Original document orientation as
displayed in the native file should be maintained in the TIFF image (e.g., portrait to portrait,
and landscape to landscape).
11

b.

Excel documents and any other documents that a party identifies as

not being reasonably readable (such as Access or Microsoft Project) in TIFF format will
be provided in native format with a TIFF placeholder noting the Bates number,
confidentiality stamp and the fact that the document is being provided in native format.
c.

When Word documents are converted to TIFFs, the version that will

be converted is as it was last saved by the custodian. This means that if it was last saved
with track changes turned on that the images and metadata will reflect the track changes.
d.

The parties will accommodate reasonable requests for production of

specific documents in color or in native format where such format is needed to understand
relevant information about the document.
e.

Database Load Files/Cross-Reference Files. Documents should be

provided with (1) a Concordance delimited file and (2) an Opticon delimited file.
Example of Opticon Delimited File:
ABC0000001,ABC001,D:\IMAGES\001\ABC0000001.TIFF,Y,,,3
ABC0000002,ABC001,D:\IMAGES\001\ABC0000002.TIFF,,,,,
ABC0000003,ABC001,D:\IMAGES\001\ABC0000003.TIFF,,,,,
ABC0000004,ABC001,D:\IMAGES\001\ABC0000004.TIFF,Y,,,2
ABC0000005,ABC001,D:\IMAGES\001\ABC0000005.TIFF,,,,,
Example of Concordance Delimited File:
þBegDocþþEndDocþþAttachRangeþþCustodianþ
f.

The metadata and other fielded data noted in paragraph (k), below,

will be provided in the following format:
a) fields should be delimited by the default Concordance field delimiter
for ANSI character 20 ()
b) String values within the fields file should be enclosed with a text
delimiter (þ)
12

c) The first line should contain file metadata headers and other fields and
below the first line there should be exactly one line for each document
d) Each row of metadata and other fields must contain the same number
of fields as the header row
e) Multi-values should be separated by a semicolon (;)
g.

Text Files. For each document, a document-level text file should be

provided in addition to the TIFFs. The text of native files should be extracted directly from
the native file and each text file will be named using its corresponding image files (e.g.,
ABC0000001.TXT).

If text is not available, OCR will be provided unless the document

was originally maintained in hard copy or image, nonsearchable format and the producing
party has chosen not to OCR the document because the expense is not justified, given the
types of documents and utility of the OCR. In that situation, the producing party will
produce the document as it was kept in the ordinary course of business, without OCR, and
will identify for the receiving party in the production cover letter the Bates numbers of the
documents that have not had OCR applied. For redacted documents, OCR will be provided
for the un-redacted portions of the documents.
h.

Unique IDs. Each image should have a unique file name which will

be the Bates number of that page. The Bates number must appear on the face of the image
in the lower right corner (e.g., CSX0000001).
i.
The following metadata fields will be provided, if reasonably
available:
Field Name

Prod Beg Bates

Description/ Comments

Fields for ESI
and or Hard
Copy
Bates number associated with the first page ESI and Hard
of a document.
Copy

13

Prod End Bates

Bates number associated with the last page ESI and Hard
of a document.
Copy
Prod Beg Bates Beginning bates of the family group
ESI (email)
Attach
Prod End Bates Ending bates of the family group
ESI (email)
Attach
Custodian
Specific description of who provided the ESI and Hard
document. The parties agree that global e- Copy (excluding
mail searches are acceptable in which global
email
designated custodians’ e-mails are searched searches)
using certain search terms. In the case of
global e-mail searches, the custodian field
will be populated with “e-mail search,”
“enterprise vault,” or other generic
language while the to/from/cc will remain
as it was in the native format.
DeDuped
Custodians associated with the de-duped ESI (excluding
Custodians
records of this document.
global
email
searches)
SUBJECT
Information from the Subject line of the e- ESI (email)
mail message.
FROM
Author of e-mail message
ESI (email)
TO
Recipients of the email message
ESI (email)
CC
BCC
Date Sent
Date Received
Author
Confidentiality

10.

Recipient of Carbon Copies of the e-mail
message
Recipient of blind carbon copies of the email message
Date and time that the email message was
sent
Date and time that the email message was
received
Author of document
Confidentiality designation of
document

ESI (email)
ESI (email)
ESI (email)
ESI (email)
ESI
ESI and
Copy

Hard

Databases. Certain types of databases are dynamic in nature and will often

contain numerous fields that are neither relevant nor reasonably calculated to lead to the

14

discovery of admissible evidence, and some file types may not be amendable to conversion
into anything meaningful in TIFF format. Thus, a party may opt to produce relevant and
responsive information from databases and certain documents in an alternate form, such as
a report or data table containing the potentially responsive relevant information. These
reports or data tables will be produced in a reasonably useable format such as in native
Excel or in a static image format, where reasonably useable.
11.

The parties agree to meet and confer prior to producing native file types other

than those described in this section.
12.

Attachment beginning and ending fields should be provided, thus, parent-

child relationships (the association between an attachment and its parent document) must
be preserved.
13.

If a party has a large volume of hard copy documents and wishes to make the

documents available in hard copy format, the party may do so, or the parties may meet and
confer about limiting the scope of discovery or other reasonable process.
14.

System Files: ESI shall be filtered for file type using an acceptable industry

standard exclusion list or process (“Industry Standard”). The parties recognize that to
reduce the document review population, additional file types may need to be excluded. If
a party plans to exclude from review a file type not within the Industry Standard, that party
must disclose such an exclusion to the other party, which will have five (5) business days
to object. Any objection not made in this period will be waived. If objections are made,
the parties will meet and confer to resolve them.

15

15.

ESI items processed after the execution date of this Production Stipulation

and Order shall be processed in a manner that preserves the source native file and metadata
without modification, including time, date, and time-zone metadata consistent with the
requirements provided herein.
16.

Modifications: Any practice or procedure set forth herein may be varied by

agreement of the parties, confirmed in writing, where such variance is deemed appropriate
to facilitate the timely and economical production of Documents.
It appearing that all parties have agreed to the ESI Protocol set forth hereinabove;
NOW THEREFORE the Court hereby adopts the protocol for use by all parties in the
above-captioned cases.

IT IS SO ORDERED.

s/J. Michelle Childs
J. MICHELLE CHILDS
United States District Judge
Dated: January 19, 2016
Columbia, South Carolina

16

We So Stipulate:
s/ S. Jahue Moore
S. Jahue Moore, Fed. Bar No. 3120
MOORE TAYLOR LAW FIRM, P.A.
1700 Sunset Boulevard
Post Office Box 5709
West Columbia, SC 29171
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]

s/ Joseph Preston Strom, Jr.
Joseph Preston Strom, Jr. Fed. Bar No. 4354
John R. Alphin, Fed. Bar No. 9923
STROM LAW FIRM, LLC
2110 N. Beltline Boulevard
Columbia, South Carolina 29204-3999
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

s/ Steven J. Pugh
Steven J. Pugh, Fed. Bar No. 7033
Jared H. Garraux, Fed. Bar No. 10113
Caleb M. Riser, Fed. Bar No. 10666
RICHARDSON, PLOWDEN & ROBINSON, P.A.
1900 Barnwell Street
Columbia, South Carolina 29201
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
s/ Elizabeth A. McLeod
Elizabeth A. McLeod, Fed. Bar No. 9786
Of Counsel:
FULCHER HAGLER LLP
Post Office Box 1477
Augusta, Georgia 30903-1477
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]

17

s/ A. Camden Lewis
A. Camden Lewis, Fed. Bar No. 2669
J. Ryan Heiskell, Fed. Bar No. 10212
LEWIS BABCOCK L.L.P
Post Office Box 11208
1513 Hampton Street
Columbia, South Carolina 29211-1208
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
s/ Tracey C. Green
Mitchell Willoughby, Fed. Bar No. 4702
Tracey C. Green, Fed. Bar No. 6644
ElizabethAnn Carroll, Fed. Bar No. 6246
WILLOUGHBY & HOEFER, P.A.
930 Richland Street
Post Office Box 8416
Columbia, South Carolina 29202-8416
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
s/ Patrick J. Frawley
Patrick J. Frawley, Fed. Bar No. 890
S. Joseph Maye, S.C. Bar No. 100851
DAVIS FRAWLEY, LLC
140 East Main Street (29072)
Post Office Box 489
Lexington, South Carolina 29071-0489
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]