ESI opinion from Judge Jones of the W.D. Va.

In Adair v. EQT Production Company, Judge Jones overruled objections to Magistrate Judge Sargent's ruling, but modified it, where the subject matter was EQT's obligation to produce 370 GB of e-mails. Judge Jones agreed that EQT would have to produce certain segments of the e-mails, screened for specified search terms to increase the changes of avoiding privileged documents, but without screening by humans.

The Court explained:

"EQT’s position is that the only reasonable search for privileged and responsive documents is done by human beings on an individual document basis. As the bulk of trending case law and the recent amendments to the rules indicate, this is an untenable position."