Forms of Production
Pursuant to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, "a responding party must produce the information in a form or forms in which it is ordinarily maintained or in a form or forms that are reasonably usable."
There are four basic forms of production for electonically stored information:
- Paper;
- Quasi-paper, which is essentially paper in electronic form, such as .tif files and .pdf files, often with associated metadata and full text;
- Quasi-native form, such as an IBM AS400 database produced as an ASCII, comma-delimited file with associated file and field structural information; and
- Native, where the electronic information is produced as it is maintained and used.