Ruling of the Tribunal in relation to the appropriate way to manage the disclosure of documents by the Defendants ("Apple"). The documents in question are the output of disclosure exercises which Apple has carried out previously, in proceedings in the United States and Australia (collectively, the "Repositories").
The parties have agreed that each party will formulate proposals for search terms to be applied to the Repositories in order to identify documents relating to the issues (these searches are described as "search strings"). Apple will report on the outcome of applying the search strings to the Repositories. The parties will then meet to finalise the appropriate search strings to determine the production of documents to the Class Representative, and will apply those search strings to the Repositories, resulting in a universe of "Responsive Documents" for production to the Class Representative.
The Tribunal declined the Class Representative's request to require Apple to conduct a relevance review of the Responsive Documents in Repositories prior to their production. The documents in the Repositories have been subject to a relevance review which ought to be sufficient for the present purposes.
