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by williamcotton 667 days ago
If the experts are playing hardball then transformations of any and everything into PDFs is an effective tactic.
2 comments

No. See the various state rules of civil procedure concerning the presumptive and requested form of production of electronically stored information. An example is Ariz. R. Civ. P. 26.1(c)(3).
I've seen plenty of productions of source code, email tranches, and database dumps in PDF format in both state and federal suits this year alone.

I've never worked with the courts in Arizona so perhaps this kind of gamesmanship is not allowed.

Related, I worked at a company that had a standards body forced information sharing agreement with a competitor. One of the requirements was that documentation had to be shared.

Unfortunately, our documentation was a very well formatted with links and was searchable, making it easy to navigate. So in an act of malicious compliance, the few thousand page document was printed then scanned to low res, jpg artifact filled, crooked, but still legible, set of images that were shared as a fairly useless pdf.

There was a time that would have worked because most judges didn't even know how to turn on their computers, much less the difference in file types.

Now, do the same thing and the judge would fine the company, and its lawyers, for failing to comply with discovery. And if the judge is super pissed off, they may issue a warrant for the CEO to spend a few nights in jail thinking about his decision-making process.