On September 3, 2020, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied plaintiff Jennifer Livingston, et al.’s motion to compel the defendant‘s use of a particular methodology for identifying responsive electronically stored information (ESI) and a particular process for technology assisted review (TAR) in the matter of Livingston v. City of Chicago.
Livingston argued that the parties should negotiate a detailed TAR protocol to govern the review of all 1.5 million produced documents, rather than allow the State to perform a responsive review of a subset of 192,000 emails previously determined to be potentially relevant. The court ruled that the “prior discovery order did not confine the City to using search terms or otherwise dictate what methodology” was appropriate to perform search term culling prior to predictive coding, allowing the state to implement its preferred TAR workflow.
