In Dahl, et. al. v. Bain Capital Partners, LLC, et. al., 2009 WL 1748526 (D. Mass. June 22, 2009), U.S. Senior District Court Judge Edward F. Harrington granted plaintiffs' motion for entry of order governing the format of certain electronically stored information, including limiting metadata production for emails and other electronic documents to 12 common fields.

 The court denied defendants' request for cost shifting given defendants' failure to identify any documents as inaccessible or to explain the nature of that inaccessibility. However, the court, citing FRCP 34, held that defendants did not have to pay the cost of scanning paper documents to put them into an electronic format or provide optical character recognition for electronic documents without text search capabilities.  While Rule 34 suggests a responding party should translate electronically stored information to make the information "reasonably usable", the court ruled that plaintiffs had failed to show that OCR translation of the documents was necessary for their use.  However, the court further ruled that if the defendants changed the format of any documents for their own use in litigation, they should offer plaintiffs access to the same altered documents.   This rule did not apply to excel spreadsheets, which the court ordered produced in their native format along with defendants' privilege logs.