Andrews v. Nexion Health Management, Inc., No. 24-560-JWD-RLB (M.D. La. Nov. 10, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
A nursing home ordered to produce its staff timekeeping data turned it over as PDF pages. Its defense was that the order to compel named no format. On November 10, a magistrate judge in the Middle District of Louisiana rejected that defense. In the court's view, Rule 34's form requirement for ESI applies even when the order names no format. The court directed a new production in native Excel or CSV format within seven days. Contempt was deferred. The court warned that a further failure would bring sanctions.
What happened
The plaintiffs sued over the death of their father, a resident of the facility. They allege that a shortage of nursing staff caused his injuries. For their staffing expert's analysis, they sought the facility's punch detail data, which shows when nursing personnel clocked in and out.
An earlier order directed the nursing home to produce punch detail and related payroll records for its nursing staff. At the plaintiffs' request, the nursing home also produced another set of daily staffing reports in Excel. The punch detail data came only as PDFs.
The plaintiffs then moved for contempt. According to their motion, the PDF data could not be sorted, filtered, totaled, or used in any calculation. Rekeying the data by hand, they argued, would be costly and prone to transcription error.
The court's analysis
The court relied on Rule 34(b)(2)(E)(ii). When a request specifies no form, a party must produce ESI in a form in which it is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form. The court stated that this duty is a requirement of discovery itself. Its earlier order therefore "need not specifically state the requirement for it to apply" to the nursing home.
In the court's reasoning, converting a file solely for production can strip the search, copy, paste, and sort features that make the data useful. A file converted that way is not produced as it is kept in the ordinary course of business, the court explained.
The plaintiffs' own requests gave the court a second reason. Their instructions asked that documents be produced in the form in which they are found in their normal filing place. The nursing home never objected to that instruction. It also never claimed to keep the punch detail data as PDFs. On that record, the court concluded that PDF was the incorrect form.
The nursing home made no burden argument. Any such argument, the court observed, would be contradicted by the nursing home's production of the other staffing reports in Excel. The court also found that any burden of reproducing the data was of the nursing home's own making. Producing the punch detail data in a non-native form, the court concluded, was a failure to comply with the earlier order.
Why it matters
When an order to compel names no format, a producing party should still produce structured data as kept or in a reasonably usable form. Converting it to page images invites a second production in native form on a short deadline.
A requesting party that wants structured data in native form should say so in the requests themselves. A form instruction that draws no objection can give the court an independent basis to order the requested form. Even a general instruction to produce documents as found in their normal filing place can carry that weight. ESI-specific wording is still the better practice.
A producing party that prefers another form should object to the requested form in its written response. It should also be ready to show a real burden. Producing comparable data natively for the same requester will undercut any later claim that a native production is hard.
A producing party that receives a cure period should treat the reproduction as its last opportunity before the sanctions the court reserved.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
