any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party's claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case, considering the importance of the issues at stake in the action, the amount in controversy, the parties' relative access to relevant information, the parties' resources, the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues, and whether the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit.

Plaintiff NIC need not produce documents that are duplicative of documents NIC previously has produced to Defendants; however, when NIC does not produce a document in response to a specific document request because it has previously produced the document, NIC shall state that it has previously produced all responsive documents and identify the discovery request, by set and request number, in response to which the document was previously produced and/or identify the third party from whom the documents were received voluntarily. NIC need not identify the duplicative documents by Bates numbers.

Where, as here, the requesting party has chosen to serve several hundred document requests, with multiple requests corresponding to a single category of documents, Rule 34 does not require the responding party to respond in the fashion defendants here demand. Most of these requests call for plaintiffs to produce all documents that relate to a specific contention within a particular paragraph of the complaint, with each paragraph dissected into multiple contentions, each contained within a separate request. Thus, in effect, what defendants seek to do is to convert their document requests into contention interrogatories, but bypassing Rule 33's 25-interrogatory limit. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 33(a)(1). This is improper and an abuse of the discovery process. Even if plaintiffs had not produced documents as they are ordinarily maintained, the court would not compel plaintiffs to perform the extremely and unduly burdensome task defendants demand.

Were NIC ordered to identify every publicly filed court document that supports or relates to each allegation identified in NTG's Fourth Set of Requests for Production, counsel for NIC would be required to work hundreds of professional hours to complete that task. Counsel for NIC would be required to evaluate—for hundreds of requests—which public documents relate to or support the allegation quoted in the Request, and then list every publicly filed document. That is an enormously burdensome task. The work cannot be calculated with precision, but the cost to NIC for that task would very likely exceed $30,000.