Deposition Extra Expenses Taxed.
In Alcatel-Lucent USA v. Juniper Networks, Case No. H040819 (6th Dist. Nov. 8, 2017) (unpublished), a trial judge decided to tax certain deposition expenses for rough ASCII disks, real time feeds, streaming texts, and digital transcripts incurred within 30 days of trial. The taxed party appealed, arguing that the deposition material was needed based on the impending nature of the trial such that the lower court’s order was an abuse of discretion. The appellate court disagreed, colorfully we might, in these words: “Reduced to its essentials, Juniper’s argument is that the court, having approved the overall justification for costs of this type, could not in the exercise of a sound discretion limit their recovery to the 30 days preceding trial. We cannot agree. The claimed justification was that the imminence of trial justified having immediate access to a draft text of the transcribed testimony. Imminence is not an absolute quantity. Its sufficiency as good cause for a claimed expenditure is the kind of determination that falls within a necessarily discretionary zone. It is an example of ‘a kind of arbitral power, not unlike that of a baseball umpire,’ which trial courts must exercise ‘in the name of judicial economy.’ (See Miyamoto v. Department of Motor Vehicles (2009) 176 Cal.App.4th 1210, 1222 (conc. opn. of Rushing, J.).) ‘This function recognizes that on certain issues, the trial court’s ruling should stand simply because the social cost of questioning it outweighs the private benefit of having a reviewing court substitute its views for those of the trial court.’ This is the kind of call the trial court was required to make. We cannot say—even with instant replay—that it got the call wrong. The order taxing costs cannot therefore be held an abuse of discretion.”