In Acciona Wastewater Solutions LP v. Greater Vancouver Sewerage and Drainage District, 2025 BCSC 1256 (CanLII), the defendant challenged the plaintiff’s production as an impermissible “document dump”, claiming a high volume of irrelevant and duplicate files. The plaintiff produced documents using a TAR 1.0 review process, which trains a model to predict which documents are relevant, producing approximately 4 million documents with an estimated precision rate of 81 percent.
The Court dismissed the defendant’s application to compel an amended list of documents, finding that the plaintiff complied with its production obligations under the BC Supreme Court Civil Rules (the “Rules”) and the agreed upon electronic document exchange protocol between the parties.
In reaching this conclusion, the Court made several notable eDiscovery findings, including:
- The Sedona Canada Principles and the principle of proportionality inform the disclosure obligations under the Rules.
- To be “meaningful, reliable, and complete”, a production should allow the receiving party to review the disclosure without the added burden of excluding undue numbers of irrelevant or duplicative documents, however the standard is not perfection.
- There is no “industry standard” that should be applied for recall and precision rates.
- The precision rate of a TAR model is not appropriate as the sole metric for determining compliance with production obligations under the Rules. It can be a factor to be considered but parties should not be required to strictly achieve high precision and/or high recall rates that the cost of doing so may not be proportionate.
- To establish that a list of documents is “inaccurate”, there should be evidence showing a “dilatory and casual attitude to production of documents.”
- The Rules should not be applied rigidly, particularly in cases involving large numbers of documents. Modern complex litigation requires a functional and pragmatic approach to rules that were developed during a different era of documentary records.