Independent Living Center of Southern California v. City of Los Angeles

Independent Living Center of Southern California (center) (plaintiff) sued the City of Los Angeles (city) (defendant) in January 2012. The center’s electronic-discovery (e-discovery) request required the city to review over two million pieces of electronically stored information (ESI). The parties could not agree on how best to screen the ESI to identify relevant and discoverable material. As a result, the parties missed the court’s September 2013 deadline for completion of discovery. The court met with the parties in an attempt to work out a mutually satisfactory search protocol. Over the next nine months, the court met with the parties 11 times, usually for an hour or more each time. When the parties still could not reach agreement, the court ordered the city to use the predictive-coding form of technology-assisted review (TAR) to identify 10,000 of the most relevant ESI documents. The city hired Equivio, a contractor, to perform this work. In mid-June 2014, the court convened a twelfth conference and ordered the center to review the documents that Equivio identified. Following the mid-June conference, the center asked the court to order Equivio to subject those documents to a quality-assurance (QA) test. The court devised four questions designed to elicit Equivio’s opinion as to the need for such testing and directed the parties’ technical experts to discuss the questions with Equivio. The experts came back with opposing accounts of Equivio’s responses to the questions. The court convened a thirteenth conference with the parties late in June 2014.