In Fells v. Virginia Dep’t of Trans., 2009 WL 866178 (E.D. Va. 2009), Plaintiff Frankie Fells, Sr., sued his former employer, defendant Virginia Department of Transportation, claiming unlawful discrimination against him on the basis of race, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, et seq. On October 28, 2008, the Rocket Docket issued a memorandum final order granting defendant's motion for summary judgment, based on the applicable statute of limitations. The Court denied plaintiff's motion for reconsideration.
On November 4, 2008, defendant submitted a bill of costs, to which plaintiff objected on November 18, 2008. Defendant responded to the objection on November 25, 2008. On February 11, 2009, the Clerk issued a notice of taxing costs, and on February 23, 2009, the Clerk taxed costs in the amount of $1,739.60 against plaintiff. This amount included costs for depositions and copies of medical records, which were not contested. Defendant then filed a Motion for Costs asking the Court to review the Clerk's denial of costs in the amount of $15,741.50, which defendant paid for processing electronic data. Specifically, defendant paid this amount to a contractor for “electronic records initial processing, Metadata extraction, [and] file conversion.” These efforts were the first steps to creating a database that would facilitate discovery, but defendant abandoned the project after plaintiff did not provide terms to limit the scope of the data. Defendant sought to recover those initial electronic processing costs by claiming that they were taxable expenses under 28 U.S.C. § 1920(4), specifically comparing such costs to the expressly recoverable costs of copying and exemplification of records.
